The Watcher and the Dancer
by DearEveryone
Summary: Following the death of her husband, Shelby Corcoran moves her two daughters, Santana and Rachel from Boston to Lima, Ohio in an effort to rebuild their lives. But a new start is not always a fresh one, a lesson the Corcoran girls are soon to learn as they tackle William McKinley High School, love, loss, and a new man in their mother's life with a dark secret. Pezberry Siblings AU.
1. I'm Through With the Past

**Hello all! Well, this is my first attempt at putting any of my writing up. It's an idea that I've had in my head for some time but am just now getting around to writing it. It's AU revolving around the idea of Santana and Rachel being sisters, told from Santana's POV. Pairings will eventually be Brittana. If anybody has any questions or is confused, feel free to message me/leave a comment or hit me up on Tumblr, my name is HowTheHellDidIGetHere 'cause I know for a fact a few people are gonna be a bit out of the normal character you may be used to. I'm going to try to update at least once a week, but I'm pretty busy these days so I'll do what I can.**

**Thanks for taking a chance with this one!**

**The Watcher and the Dancer**

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"Of two sisters one is always the watcher, the other, the dancer." - Louise Gluck

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**Chapter 1 - **I'm Through with the Past (But the Past Isn't Through with Me)

When I was younger, the very last thing that I'd wanted in my life was a sibling.

In my first memory, I am three years old. I have this undying, vivid image of my mother standing barefoot at the crest of the stoop adorning our cramped, South Boston apartment building, her pregnant stomach stretching the fabric of her favorite floral-patterned dress to its absolute threshold as she bit at her fingernails, grinding them to the quick in her efforts to stem the frustrations emanating from little three-year-old me relentlessly asking her if it were possible for her to simply _stop_ being pregnant.

Needless to say, that never happened because several short months later - despite my best efforts to prevent the dreaded event - my little sister was born, plagued straight from the get-go by my inconsiderate parents who had chosen to name her Rockleigh Ashthore Finbarr Corcoran.

Or as my mother chose to call her for simplicities sake - Rachel.

I know, I know the whole thing sounds both crazy as well as a tad bit selfish on my parents' part, but it was an ever-lingering family tradition, a name passed down across generations of unsuspecting Corcorans ever since the early 1800s, and if there is one thing that you need to know about South Boston in the mid-90's, it was that its residents had a tendency to hold onto their heritages as though they were gold, because more often than not, their heritages were just about the only thing that any of them actually had left.

So yes, despite the fact that the name had been one historically served to the more male counterparts of my ancestors, my mother's insistency upon having no more children after Rachel was born made her my father's last real shot towards continuing this expansive tradition.

In the beginning I had hated the mere _idea_ of having a little sister so much that by default, I had wound up hating Rachel too.

We shared a bedroom, the two of us as our apartment at the time had been so small. Her crying would always keep me awake at night, and the smell of dirty diapers lingered offensively against every stitch of every article of clothing that I owned so that my nickname in the Kindergarten class I attended in the fall following Rachel's second birthday was quickly pinned as _Dirty Diaper Corcoran_.

It was an alter ego, I'm sad to say, that somehow managed to stick firmly by my side throughout my first seven years at St. Augustine Elementary until finally, I had reached middle school and my classmates slowly began to learn that uttering a curse word acually _wasn't_ an offense punishable by death. After that, they upgraded to simply addressing me as _Shit Head Corcoran_.

Needless to say, I was not the most popular kid growing up.

But I didn't mind. Really, I didn't because the thing was that all of the bullying, and all of the teasing, and all of the constant isolation quickly taught me a very valuable lesson regarding just how impossible it was to actually, honestly, truly hate your family.

As much as you may have wanted to sometimes, of course.

I was the one holding Rachel's hand on the day that she took her first step. She was the one holding mine on the day that my first boyfriend, Thomas Moore - who had only asked me out because his friends dared him to - broke up with me in the seventh grade. I was the one that had rode on the T with her to Massachusetts General Hospital's emergency room after she'd gotten cracked in the head while playing softball in gym class and had to have thirteen stitches laced directly above her eyebrow. She was the one that had been crying harder than I was after I'd fallen off of the monkey bars one pristine Sunday afternoon in Moakley Park and broke my arm in two places.

Rachel has been my rock, it seemed, from the very beginning.

She held onto me tight, refusing to let go after I came home sobbing when Siobhan McManus and her group of friends printed copies of my diary all over the school, exposing my petty crush on a football player who hadn't even known my name until then. She'd supported me even as my own mother stubbornly refused my bid to have me transferred into Boston's public school system. We had kept each other upright on the day of my father's funeral.

"Hey mom..."

My mother was a strong, intimidating woman with a strongset jaw that would make her beautiful if it wasn't so permanently transfixed into a scowl that possessed the ability to turn even the strongest of men into withering bafoons with a single glance.

She was the kind of mother that I never truly felt comfortable turning to for advice. I don't know, I guess we just never really developed that kind of a bond. I loved her, of course I did, she was my mother after all, but at the same time she just wasn't really that type of parent and I wasn't really that type of daughter.

Besides, that is what I had Rachel for.

But today, well today was different. Today, I had been on the prowl for my mother for hours, finally spotting her hovering over a pile of moving boxes stacked taller than she was in the corner of our otherwise empty, brand new kitchen. And today, even as I stood, practically in her face, shouting her name, she couldn't hear me. Couldn't look at me.

The only thing that you truly need to know about my mother is that my father's funeral was six weeks ago Tuesday and she still insisted upon wearing black everywhere she went. She hadn't exactly taken his unexpected death well. None of us had, I guess.

My father had been a proud man of a relatively noble upbringing. He'd raised his wife and two daughters in a relatively descent neighborhood on Castle Island in South Boston; a conservative Irish-Catholic section of Southie that had its fair share of violence, but at the same time, was nice enough to allow me to walk my sister down the beach on Saturdays in order to watch my dad's weekly rugby matches against the Boston Police Department, where he played a pretty mean Fly Half for the Fire Squad.

Then one night, his job had taken him to a five-alarm fire call at two o'clock early one Saturday morning in downtown Roxbury, a neighborhood that all of our friends and family had always warned us against wandering along by ourselves in the dark.

It had started inside of an old, abandoned apartment complex, tattered and worn to begin with, let alone with the addition of flames licking at its already weathered foundation. A couple of college students had found their way inside in search of a place to party and it _was_ perfect, really - quiet, secluded, in a neighborhood where a college party was the least of the cops in that area's worries... The only issue was that the elecricity had been shut down months ago after the building was foreclosed.

And what better way to light a room than with a bunch of candles, right?

He'd barely entered into the rotting basement before the entire building caved in and collapsed in on him. That night, the Boston Fire Department had lost three of its best men. My father was one of them.

So after that my mother, with no job, barely any money, and two kids to feed, moved us from the expensive, over-populated fog of the great Northeast, out west, straight into Lima, Ohio, a vast wasteland and apparent breeding ground for nothing more extensive than cows and rednecks.

In my general opinion, anyway.

"Mom!" I call for her again, searching for the attention that I had found myself craving ever since I - a notorious daddy's girl - lost the main source that provided it to me.

"What is it, Santana?" Her voice is distant and uninterested as she chooses to finally acknowledge my presence. When she does turn to face me, I can't help but notice that she is clutching onto one of her favorite pictures of her and my father so tightly that the frame's glass is cracked straight down the center. I know the image well, I had taken it; a candid image of my mother standing at the edge of Santa Monica Pier looking over the ocean while my dad stands delicately behind her with his arms carefully folded around her waist, wrapped into her body and holding her close. For some reason, I have been thinking a lot about that trip; two weeks on a California beach, standing on the edge of the Pacific Ocean with the sun beaming down our faces. It is a memory that I cannot seem to shake, which has me thinking - I can really use a vacation right about now.

"Do you know where the box with all of my clothes is?" I ask, choosing to ignore the obvious. "The ones that are in my room are all Rachel's."

"I don't know, Santana." My mother sighs, placing the picture heavily back down against the window sill before running a shaking hand through her hair. It is only then that I notice that her palm is bleeding, although I cannot be entirely sure that _she_ has caught onto this quite yet. "Did you check in Rache's room? I know that she still has a couple of boxes in there that she hasn't opened yet."

"No, I didn't." I answer simply to end this empty conversation because truth-be-told, I had already searched, unsuccessfully, inside of Rachel's room without so much of a trace of my wardrobe three hours ago. "I'll go do that now, I guess."

With a sigh of defeat, I turn to exit the dismal kitchen, stepping towards the hallway just as - in one quick, last minute decision - my mother has a sudden change of heart.

"Hey, Santana." She calls me back.

"Yeah, mom?" I turn, and for a second my mother remains silent so that I can only see the words that are written inside of her expression. There is something there. Perhaps the truth that she has been meaning to say. But whatever it is, she swallows it before it has the opportunity to be released, and it does not linger long enough upon her delicate features for me to properly decipher them.

"I'm going out to that old church down the street tonight for Sunday mass." This is what comes out of her mouth instead. "I'll probably be back late so don't wait u. And make sure that Rachel gets to bed early. The two of you have school in the morning."

"Okay mom..." I nod, accepting her statement for what it was.

Growing up, our family had never really been the praying type. Mostly, we made light over our religion. But after my father's death, after life proved not to work out for my mother quite as well as she had previously expected it to, she turned to God... or something like that.

You see, for me, the way I saw things, religion was nothing more than a crutch used by those with a mortal fear of loneliness in an effort to allow them to pretend - for a little while anyways - that they weren't nearly as alone as they truly were. As for the rest of us... well, I think that we had just learned to prefer things that way. Besides, nobody was out there listening to us... I guess that even Jesus Christ himself must get tired of listening to everybody else's problems after a while, and the way that I was starting to see things, he had already died for all of our since once before. Now it was our turn to start accepting a little bit of the responsibility.

But still, if God really is the only one that knows where I'll be come tomorrow, sometimes I can't help but wish that he would come down here and give me some sort of a hint.

"Hey Rach," I strolled casually into Rachel's bedroom, greeting my little sister as she sat Indian-style against her bed, sorting through a large cardboard box of worthless knick-knacks and momentos.

"Santana!" She scolds witha harsh tone that stops me dead in my tracks. "You're supposed to knock first!"

"Oh..." I smirk at her insistence towards a privacy that she has been clutching onto these past couple of days upon finding out that finally - after fourteen long years - her and I would no longer be sharing a bedroom. "Sorry, I guess that I'm just not quite used to your room not being my room anymore quite yet."

"It's okay, I guess." She shrugs, giggling feebly as I attempt to humor her by retracing my steps backwards, retreating back out of the room and into the hallway where I rap my knuckles prominenty against the open door.

"Can I come in?"

"Of course you can." She nods appreciatively, the light catching her prominent cheekbones in such a manner that makes her look even more like our mother than she already does...

Rachel and I, we both take after our mother entirely. My father - a notorious sweet talker - used to always entertain the two of us by telling us how lucky we both were that we had gotten all of the good genes. To this day when I tell people that I am half Irish, they don't believe me. But it's true. My father had been born in Dublin, raised in Boston. Fifty percent of me is as Irish as Patty's goddamn pig. The other fifty percent - the half from my mother's side - is such an ecclectic array that I could sit and talk about it for hours and still not get through the half of it. Let's just say that Sunday school in Southie had always been a lot of fun, because while my mom may have been a _converted_ Catholic, that did not mean that she could convert from _looking_ Jewish. And neither could her two daughters.

Long story short, being a Jew in South Boston... well, lets just say that I might as well have been a dog walking on its hind legs.

"Hey, do you wanna go explore around Lima a bit? See what people do for fun in this cow town..."

I make the offer for her own benefit. The only person that has been struggling with my father's death more than my mother is Rachel. She has her good days and she has her bad, just like the rest of us, but the bad tend to linger a lot more when Rachel is left to her own devices; sitting with nothing more than her thoughts. That's when she closes up. That's when she scares me the most. Besides, the two of us have been dragging our existance through the very depths of time these past couple of weeks, clawing for a chance to fall back into the past, begging for a glimpse into the future, no matter what that future might hold.

I'm starting to think that that couldn't be a very healthy coping mechanism for much of anybody.

"Sure," Rachel shrugs but I can tell by the motions of her bony shoulders that she isn't incredibly enthusiastic about the idea, she's just agreeing because she knows that I will be on her back if she says anything else.

It's a gorgeous day today in Lima, Ohio. Late in the month of September, it is days like today that I truly miss Boston the most. Sure, we may boast a fall season that only lasts one week - two on a good year - before the blistering winter decides to descend upon our unsuspecting city, but for that week or two, Boston is truly as beautiful as any city will ever get.

It is a gorgeous day today in Lima, Ohio but that does not make it home.

"Are you worried about school at all?" I break the silence festering between Rachel and I because it is starting to make my skin itch and the hairs on the back of my neck stand on edge, and I know that Rachel has not been one to initiate conversation these days. If I am not the one to start talking, the two of us will stay quiet for the rest of our lives, and I know that by the end of the line, despite how shallow you dig your own grave, you are going to have to lay down inside of it eventually.

"No." She lies to me. "Are you?"

"No." I myself, lie through my own teeth, but to my surprise this actually brings a smile onto Rachel's face. I find myself having to resist the urge to freeze this moment in time, to grab onto her shoulders, lean closer in towards her, and observe the action in its completeness as if to say _oh, there you are_.

"Liar."

"You lied first." I grin, nudging her playfully with my hip so that we laugh like we used to before fate stopped caring about either one of our plans. But this relief is short lived as even it, eventually fades into nothing. My grin falters and my hands start to get cold so that I shove them inside of the pockets of my sweatshirt, looking down at my feet as I cound each and ever step that I take.

One at a time.

"Do you think that I'll make any friends?" Rachel asks me, releasing a Pandora's Box of pent up fears and anxieties that she has apparently been holding onto regarding our first day at William McKinley High School tomorrow.

"Of course you'll make friends." I exaggerate my words, talking with a sarcastic tone as if to tell her that she is foolish for even being worried about this. "You're only a freshman, Rach you have four years with these guys. You'll have plenty of time to make new friends. Me, well I'm gonna be a senior. A couple of months and everybody's out of here anyway. They won't care about me. I'm gonna be the one that has no friends, not you."

"Yeah, but that means that you only have to be at William McKinley for a year." She points out. "So what if you have no friends, you'll get out and go to college and then you can make all of the friends that you want."

"I don't even know if I'm going to even go to college yet."

"That would be stupid." She lectures pointedly.

"Hey!"

At the end of the block, I turn the corner and jump at the presence of a third voice. Sometimes, it is so easy for me to forget that there are more people here on this planet besides me and Rachel that when somebody reminds me that this is not the case, the thought alone is almost too terrifying to comprehend.

"Hey?" I question the intrusion as my eyes focus upon its source in the distance, scanning across and locking in on a painfully beautiful boy staring back at me. He wears a loose pair of jeans that hug his hips just right, outlining his perfectly carved muscles that glisten underneath a thin film of sweat. His t-shirt is discarded on the fence post and I can't help but notice - as he looks up from the lawn mower that he is pushing - that his biceps flex purposefully. I have to resist from rolling my eyes.

"You the family that just moved in down the street?" He asks. "I don't think I've seen you around before."

"Yeah." I respond, standing my ground - a safe distance away - wary. Seeing as how my life was already enough of a message in which my entire world has been turned completely around on its head and nobody seemed to care at all, my trust in strangers these days was understandably lacking. "We're new."

"Senior?" He asks, his eyes narrowing momentarily inward towards me as he studies my features and attempts to decipher my entire story with his eyes alone. I realize in this moment that I do not particularly enjoy behind studied. Instead, I think I prefer to go unnoticed.

"Yeah." I tell him. "My sister's a freshman."

"Noah Puckerman." He finally gives me a name to match his face. Wiping his hands against the thighs of his jeans, he takes a couple of steps towards us and sticks out his hands. I consider him for a moment before shaking it, still a bit skeptical. "Everybody calls me Puck."

"Santana." I feel comfortable enough to tell him. "And this is my little sister, Rachel."

"So, what brings you to our little town, Santana and Rachel?"

"My dad died."

"That sucks." To my surprise, his face doesn't falter. Instead, Noah or Puck or whoever the hell this mysterious boy is, maintains his charming smile. flashing a row of glistening white teeth that has me swooning. Noah "Puck" Puckerman, it seems, had me at hello. "Well if it helps, my dad's an asshole so if he ever comes back, you can have mine."

"Uh... no thanks."

And just like that, the attraction is gone. I roll my eyes prominently, making sure that he can see it and grab for Rachel's hand, dragging her back towards my own house.

"You talk weird." He boxes me in, trying to prevent me from leaving before he's had the opportunity to work his magic on me. But I was raised with the street smarts of a city girl. I knew how to get away from a situation that I didn't want to be in. Jutting sharply to the side, I elbow my way past him.

"Whatever."

"No, wait!" He lunges and if anything, I am suddenly willing to give him points for his persistance. I feel his hand latching onto me by the shoulder, halting me in my tracks and practically forcing me to turn around. I put my guard up immediately, eyeing him definisively, daring him to make a move. "I meant that in a good way, you know. Where are you from?"

"Boston." Despite my better judgement, I answer him.

"Boston..." He nods slowly, tasting the word on his tongue as if to decide whether or not it fits right. "That's hot. I like it."

"Ugh. I gotta go." I not-so-subtly back away from this strange, new boy. "Come on, Rachel."

"I guess I'll see you at school tomorrow then!" He calls after me, although this time, he doens't pursue me when I take the opportunity to get away.

"Yeah!" I call over my shoulder. "I guess."

"Let me at least give you a ride!" He begins to yell as the distance between us grows further and further. He is relentless, this Noah Puckerman, and for some strange reason, I can't seem to decipher whether it is a complete and total turn off, or whether I want to ask him if he already has a girlfriend or not. I'm sure he does. Guys like Noah Puckerman do not tend to remain single.

"No thanks." I play it safe. Just in case. "We'll just take the bus."

"Come on, nobody has ever denied a ride from the Puckster before!"

"I'm pretty sure that I just did." I smirk, a half smile that is so surprisingly unlike me that not even I am entirely sure where it came from. In a flash, I have gone from a shy loser with no friends save for my little sister, to a tease leaving a gorgeous, popular, charmer haning and hanging hard.

"Those city girls, they have such mouths on them, I like it!" He plays it off well and I am starting to think that maybe, just maybe I might be able to make friends here in Lima after all. "Come on, I'll buy you breakfast and everything."

"Fine." I concede.

"So I'll see you at seven?"

"Yeah." I nod, trying to hide the fact that suddenly, I have found that I am walking on air and things do not seem nearly as bad as they did ten minutes ago _before_ this Noah Puckerman had forced his way into my life. "I'll see you at seven."


	2. Landing Feet First

**Real quick, I just wanted to thank everybody for their kind words. It's very much so appreciated! **

**Chapter 2 - **Landing Feet First

A part of me was hoping that he wouldn't show up.

Okay, _all_ of me was hoping that he wouldn't show up. I don't know very much about this _Puck_ character, but from what I have managed to deduce from our brief conversation yesterday afternoon, to use the term 'out of my element' would be the understatement of the year. So yeah, a part of me was hoping that he wouldn't show up at all this morning to drive me and Rachel to school as he'd promised, that instead he would just leave us hanging and make us the brunt of a bad joke between him and his buddies later on at school – a position that unfortunately, I was used to.

Then again, there was another foolish, naive part of me that was telling me that I better put on some extra nice clothes and dabble with some makeup that I'd stolen from my mother's bathroom, caking it onto my face for the first time in my entire life.

"What are you doing?"

My hand spasms,a sudden twitch beneath the idea that I have been caught by unexpected company. The mascara wand that I had been tentatively brushing across the lower eyelashes of my right eye slips. I curse quietly under my breath as I watch it leave a trail of black smeared across my cheek.

"Nothing." I answer quickly. Perhaps a little bit _too_ quickly. The fact that I have just been startled by my little sister barging in on me doing something totally embarrassing - like putting on makeup for an event as pathetic as school - is a humiliation that I am not willing to endure right now. As it is, I'm probably going to be getting enough of that at school today.

I duck my head into my chest, turning my back towards the door in an effort to hide the offending mark from Rachel's curious eyes. I am trying so desperately to keep her from seeing the obvious that I begin to stumble over my own motions as I rip a piece of toilet paper quickly off the roll and begin to dab my face with it, cursing only harder when instead of fixing the problem, it instead smears the mascara, creating a big, black smudge smack-dab in the center of my face.

"Is that mom's makeup?" To my utmost embarrassment, Rachel begins to take a couple of tentative steps closer towards me. Her voice is heavy with wonderment. She sounds confused as to whether she should be laughing at my stupidity or she should start processing me for an immediate psychiatric evaluation.

"Shut it, Rachel." I warn her carefully as she sneaks up behind me, a surprise attack that catches me off guard in my frantic haste. I practically let her grab a hold of my shoulders and flip me to face her. Her eyes focus inward, narrowing upon me briefly as she studies my intentions, the reasons that I have chosen to lock myself away inside of this bathroom all morning long. Her pupils dart from side to side, travelling back and forth across the abnormalities inside of my normally natural features - the powdery layer of foundation, the blush flushed red across my high cheek bones - and her face immediately erupts into a large grin.

Ugh. Little sisters.

"You're putting on makeup for _Noooah_, aren't you?" She sings his name out to me, emphasizing the vowels just to irritate me as she bats her eyelashes and pretends to swoon about the room, clearly in mockery.

His name echoes off of the walls, it bounces back into my ears and makes my face burn red with an embarrassment that not even the makeup can hide.

"Shut it Rachel!" I speak louder this time, swatting at her with the back of my hand in an effort to shoo her away from me as the sound of a horn blaring from outside drowns out my voice.

"Santana and Noah sitting in a tree..." Rachel adheres to my warning to leave me be, but she turns out of the bathroom still wearing that mischievous, sly grin on her face, humming a little sing-song that I haven't heard since elementary school. I'm glad that she can be amused by my personal mortification.

"Girls! Your ride is here!" My mother's voice beckons to us from somewhere inside of the kitchen, echoing loud and sturdy. The sheer command inside of her volume has my ears perking. It is the most confident that I have heard my mother speak in weeks. Hell, the once famed theater star has barely allowed her volume to raise above a whisper in weeks, ever since... well, _that_ day.

A couple of steps ahead of me, Rachel is stopped dead in her tracks. Turning her head over her shoulder, she shoots me a look - eyebrows raised in pleasant surprise. With her eyes, she asks me if I know what it is that has changed inside of my mother today, what it was that had finally managed to make her click after six long weeks of pure emptiness. I can only shrug in my response and she nods, the two of us communicating silently like only sisters can.

"We're coming!" Rachel answers for the both of us. Turning back around, she goes immediately back to her prancing. She is humming to herself, a soft, unidentifiable tune, pausing only to add her own occasional lyrics - "Santana Puckerman, Santana Puckerman..." She tests the flow of a new name that I am more than certain I have not heard the last of. "It's got a nice ring to it, San."

"Ugh, you're such an embarrassment." I groan towards her antics, but inside my heart is swelling. Rachel did have a point there. Santana Puckerman _did_ have a nice ring to it.

_Oh Dear God, Santana_ – I think to myself – _What are you thinking?_

I am disgusted for so much as allowing the thought to cross my mind.

I force myself to push all notions of boys and popular football players picking _me_, Santana Corcoran of all people up for my first day of school. First, I must concentrate on actually _getting_ to school. I follow Rachel into the kitchen and am met with an unfamiliar site – my mother, wearing a professional business suit, walking circles about the kitchen, multi-tasking like an expert, like this were a routine that she had never even stopped to begin with.

Her heels clack loudly against the tile floor as she balances her coffee in one hand and two brown-bagged lunches in the other. I had almost forgotten all about the job interview that she had at Carmel High School today, the reason that we had chosen Lima, Ohio out of all places to begin with.  
"Wow, mom..." I listen as Rachel lets out a low whistle, still awestruck over the idea that our mother has managed to get out of her pajamas today, let alone put together a full, compatible outfit. "You look really nice."

"Yeah mom," I echo sincerely because it _was_ nice to see her up and about for a change, busying herself with the work that she used to love so much before she gave it all up for Rachel and I... For a brief second, I feel myself being almost transported, able to travel back to a time where things had been a lot easier. A time where mornings like this had been a routine, not a gift. But that was a long time ago. "You do look nice."

"Thank you girls." She smiles appreciatively. The gesture looks almost foreign and I find myself caught staring, fascinated by the soft, gentle glow glistening across her sharp features. A part of me wants to take a photograph, to capture this moment so that I may savor it, just in case she somehow manages to lose it again. "Now hurry up, you don't want to be late." She gestures with her hands in order to shuffle us forward, passing us each our respective lunches as we pass. I shove mine quickly into my backpack, shouldering the bag before pushing towards the door in one, fluid motion.

"Bye mom!" I call over my shoulder as I pass.

"Wait, Santana!" She hiccups over her own words as she calls me back towards her. I skid to a halt, freeze in my tracks. Even she is startled by her words. Pausing, she takes a couple of steps forward towards me. Her eyes scan carefully across my face. For a second, I think that she is going to follow Rachel's lead and make a comment about how I had gone above and beyond that morning to actually doll myself up for a change. Instead, she only licks her thumb before reaching up and pressing it against my cheek in the spot that I had, only minutes earlier smeared with mascara. I shudder slightly under her touch but a part of me can't help but to embrace it. I wonder if she notices when I lean forward slightly into it. "You had something on your face." She tells me.

"You can blame your daughter for that." I settle casually into a conversation with my mother with a surprising ease. It has been so long since I have been able to do this that I am forced to take a step back, blink rapidly and wonder what the hell happened between tonight and this moment to have the world turn so dramatically around on its head.

"Rachel..."

Her tone is warning, but I am smart enough to know that this is about all of the reprimanding that Rachl will get for tormenting me all morning. Must be nice, being the baby of the family.

"Uh... bye, mom!" Rachel ducks out quickly before I can blame her for any other of my misgivings, but she is not so sly in her attempts to downplay my misery. Rachel always _did_ always have a guilty face... She is lucky that she's the youngest.

"Bye, mom." I mimic my sister, turning on my heels in an effort to catch up to Rachel as my mother releases me from underneath her grasp, pushing me back into the wild, free of any and all blemishes that may otherwise mar what is already bound to be an eventful day.

"Girls?" I am halted in my tracks once more. Twice in one day? That is a record if I've ever heard of one.

"Love you guys."

Her eyes dip with sincerity. She uses her expression as a means to silently communicate with us, the reminder that despite all of the hardships that are tiny family has been facing in these last couple of weeks, my mother still really did care about her daughters. My heart swells with ease, but I do no more than nod and simply return the gesture her way.

"Love you too, ma."

And just like that, from outside, the horn blares once more and the moment is gone.

"Go." My mom shoos me away. "Before the neighbors call in a noise complaint."

I smile softly and nod my way out of the house just as Noah begins to release a swift series of short, stacatto honks that has my ears ringing relentlessly. But he receives his desired effect. I take my final handful of steps out of my house at a soft jog, just in case my mother had a point and the neighbors really _did_ decide to call in a noise complaint on us. Of course, the more I think about it, they have been forced neighbors of Noah Puckerman a lot longer than I have. They were probably used to things like this by now.

"Are you guys ready yet, or what?" He shouts through the open passenger-side window from the driver's seat. "Jesus, how long does it take for you girls to put your freaking make up on anyway?" I swallow heavily at his comment. I can only hope that Noah does not know me well enough yet to have noticed how much extra effort I've put into my appearance this morning.

"We're as ready as we'll ever be, I guess." Rachel answers on behalf of me seeing as how I seem to be struggling to find my voice at the moment while she is known for always having hers perfectly in check. To my utmost appreciation and gratitude, she leaves it only at that. Nudging her gently with my hip, I wink in my appreciation. You see, little sisters weren't _all_ that bad.

"You guys will be fine, stop worrying so much." Noah promises as Rachel jumps automatically into the backseat of Noah's tiny two-door, leaving the front seat open for me to solidify her gesture towards a truce... Just when I was thinking about giving her shot-gun too.

Of course that was only because I was considering hiding out in the backseat of Noah's old Honda all damn day today.

"If you survived school in Boston, Lima should be a piece of cake." It takes all of the effort inside of my body to hold back my desire to sneer. I can practically _feel_ the sarcasm bubbling against my tongue, my admitting to Noah that yes I may have survived fourteen miserable years of school in Boston, but I _barely_ survived...

It srikes me suddenly that Noah must have assumed that I had been blessed enough to have been placed on the same tier of the social totem pole as him when he had chosen to call out and befriend me yesterday... I swallow the truth before it can betray me. What Noah doesn't know can't hurt him, right?

"Yeah..." I mutter, mostly to myself as I settle into my seat and pull the seat belt tight across my chest. He does not hesitate. Within seconds, he is pressing tauntingly at the gas pedal, reving his engine towards anybody who is around to hear it, pulling his Oakleys across his eyes with one swift, fluid motion.

How could he _ever_ mistake us for being one int he same? I – Santana Corcoran – am a lost cause. A blind man could see that.

"Well, there _are_ still a couple of ground rules that we have to go over first." He makes no indication that implies that he'd heard my last comment. Instead, he pulls into the street, one hand expertly maneuvering the shifter, the other stationed at the top of the steering column. Never in my life have I seen a person move with such a swift confidence.

I try and take some mental notes, but I know the effort will be worthless.

"Number one; I am the king around these parts, and William McKinley High School is my kingdom." I cock an eyebrow. "Stick with me and you will be set for life."

"So William McKinley is run on a monarchy?" Rachel rolls her eyes from the back seat.

_Isn't every high school? _I think, although I never say it.

"Whatever that means." Noah waves her off. That smile never disappears from his face. "Number two – stay away from the marching band, the theater kids, the chess club, the debate team, those weirdos in the renaissance club, and most importantly, the glee club. Emphasis on staying away from the glee club." He ticks the guaranteed figures of an immediate social demise off on his fingers. I stay silent, but that does not mean that I am not taking mental notes.

"What are we allowed to do?"

"I don't know." Noah shrugs, considering my sister's question. Despite a seemingly long list of everything that we _shouldn't_ be doing, he seems to be hard-pressed to come up with ideas for a how-to guide regarding making, and actually keeping, some descent friends for a change. "Cheerios, I guess."

"Cheerios?" Rachel's brows raise, uncertain as she questions the word against her tongue, scrunching her face with the realization that it does not settle so great against her taste buds. "Like the cereal?"

"No, like the Cheerios." Noah speaks as though it is obvious, but it is not quite clicking for me and judging by the look on Rachel's face, she isn't getting it either. "You know, the cheerleading squad."

Rachel shoots me an immediate look. I deliver an identical one right back to her. I can tell just by looking at her that she is thinking the exact same thing that I am.

Cheerleading. Yeah, right.

"Anything else?" I am tactful in the way that I ask this, because what I really want to ask is – _Is there anything else that I can do besides cheerleading that will solidify my mark as not being a total loser at William McKinley High School, because there is a better chance of a group of flying pigs magically freezing hell over than there is of me ever being able to make a cheerleading squad_.

"Don't use the bathroom next to the wrestling room. Ever." I sigh. If we are moving on to bathroom regulations, I am more than certain that he is out of useful things that will apply to my attempts towards blending in with the crowd. "And if you ever eat in the cafeteria, never order the tuna fish casserole... If you have Mr. Ryerson for English class, try to sit in the back. He's a creep."

"That sounds like a lot of rules to me." I interject in the middle of his schpeal because he lost me at number two.

"You'll get used to it." He waves off my concern with a promise, but I am not so sure.

"Here we are."

Suddenly, my pulse is racing a fantastic drum cadence from deep inside of my veins. I can feel it beating from the tips of my fingers down to my very toes. This morning, I didn't think it possible but suddenly, I am more nervous now than I even was then. I hold my breath. The parking lot is already starting to fill up, and it is filling up fast.

Oh dear God, I am not ready for this.

There are kids stationed everywhere; a diverse ocean filtering itself as students begin to naturally attract towards their own cliques and groups of friends. It seems that on every corner there is a small group of heads ducked together, talking animatedly about the latest singles on the radio or about who got kicked off of _American Idol_ last night or murmuring with the recent gossip regarding who hooked up with who at whatever party, who just got jumped, who's older brother or sister just turned twenty-one so that they can now score booze... It is almost disappointing to find that high school truly is one in the same, no matter what state you attend it in. It was stupid of me for ever believing in the first place that I could fit in here. That I could fit in anywhere.

"Well, let's go." Noah beckons me out of his car just as I am starting to think that I am better off spending the rest of my high school career right here in his passenger's seat. "Come on, I'll introduce you around." He kills the engine of his car, twirling the keys briefly around his index finger before he rubs his hands up and down the velvet chest of his Letterman jacket, smoothing out the creases, checking his perfectly styled mohawk inside of the rear view mirror one last time before he whips off his seat belt and steps out from the car.

Before this moment, I may or may not have been silently wondering how truthfully Noah was speaking as he bragged about his status here at William McKinley, whether or not he had been exaggerating at all... Only now am I starting to realize that this was yet another stupid move on my part, because this boy walks like only a king could out of his car and into the masses. As he moves, all eyes turn towards him.

My heart drops when I come to realize that this will mean that all eyes will be on me as well.

I turn around in my seat, facing the back where I lock in a skeptical glance with Rachel. She is shifting uncomfortably in her seat, moving slowly as she gathers all of her belongings securely inside of her bag. Her bottom lip is pulled in between her top teeth, grinding gently.

I wonder if I look as nervous as Rachel does right now. Probably.

"Come on, Rae." I take charge and beckon her forward, because as much as I may want to, I know that we cannot just stay inside of this car all day and hide. I was sick of hiding.

I climb out of the car, folding the passenger's seat down so that Rachel can climb out. Extending a hand towards her, she accepts the offer and I pull her up and directly besides me before quickly straightening myself out. Swallowing hard, I turn towards the school and immediately, it is as though the entire world falls silent all around us. Any and all conversation grinds to an abrupt halt. There are no more excited shrieks of laughter, no more friends calling out to greet each other, no more music blaring from car radios or kids chatting away animatedly on their phones... Instead, they watch me and they watch Rachel. They stare. They silently wonder who the hell those two girls are that just climbed out of none other than Noah "Puck" Puckerman's car unannounced...

Trying to hold my chin up and match Noah's confidence, I slink behind him, my hands held firmly in a white-knuckled grasp onto the straps of my backpack. I use it like a crutch, because somehow, it seems to make placing one foot in front of the other a little bit easier.

Gradually, the heads begin to clank together once more. The students begin to shift almost naturally into an even tighter circle than before. I can't actually hear any them, but I know that they are taking about me. That new girl. That _loser_...

They sit with their friends and they worry whether or not I will be in their math class with them, just in case being a social outcast was as contagious as the bubonic plague.

They wonder if they let me borrow a pencil in English, will my disease spread onto them. Is the symptom, _sudden loss of friends_ gradual or does it happen immediately?

They know that in Chemistry, they never once learned how to balance a chemical equation or determine the meaning behind the proper structure of the period table, but on the first day were taught that gossip is as good a catalyst as any chemical reaction can ever even hope to be.

"Yo Puck, who's the chick?"

To my utmost horror, Noah guides me straight towards a relatively large group – muscular boys all wearing matching leather jackets surrounded by blonde-headed bimbos in cheerleading uniforms hanging onto their arms. This is it? No transition? No segue? He is cutting straight to the final without first ever teaching a single class.

I follow, but I am not entirely certain where to go so I keep a safe distance. This whole thing, it all seems very unnatural to me.

"This is Santana Corcoran, and this is her little sister, Rachel. New chicks, just moved into Wayne's old house down the street from me from Boston." Noah throws a thumb over his shoulder, pointing towards Rachel and I. I watch as his group of friends snake their heads around each other, staring obviously in their effort to get a nice, good look at us, evaluate us, judge us.

One of them stands and walks towards us. He is a tall boy, but still a bit goofy looking; like a new-born baby deer that hasn't quite adjusted to its long, pencil-thin legs yet. But he _does_ have a beautiful, lopsided smile that I am more than certain has already managed to get him plenty of girls in his past. He seems harmless, but regardless, I still stand guard.

"Finn Hudson." When he is finally face-to-face in front of me, I find that I am barely tall enough to reach his chest. When he sticks his hand out towards me for me to shake, I have to reach upwards to reciprocate. His grip is firm and strong but at the same time, gentle. "That's my girlfriend, Quinn Fabray." He nudges with his shoulder towards the blonde that is standing behind him. Her hair is in a ponytail that is so tight, that it pulls the skin back against her face, making her features look taut and that much more menacing than what they already do. Her arms are crossed tight over her chest, eyes glaring a whole through me so that I can tell that Quinn Fabray can see right through me already. The only motion that Quinn makes to recognize me is a nod of her head; a short, shallow bob that I return, but I divert my eyes as quickly as humanly possible.

Suddenly, I am nervous again.

"So how did you guys end up here in Lima?"

I pause briefly, stuttering over an answer that is bound to ensure immediate awkwardness. Luckily, I am spared by the shrill ring of the warning bell just above my head, cutting me off. The sound fades into a rhythm of scuffling feet as a stampede of students march from the parking lot and into the school. From somewhere behind me, I feel a tug against my elbow.

"I'm gonna go find my locker, San." Rachel tells me. My heart skips a beat but I try not to let it show. I guess that this is where we part ways.

"You're sure that you'll be okay?"

"I'll be fine." She nodes. "I promise."

"I know you will be." I tell her, pulling her into a quick, one-armed hug. I give her an extra squeeze than what I normally would; extra motivation, if you will, to help the both of us carry through our day. "But just in case, you know where to find me if you need anything, alright?"

"Alright." She nods, gazing up towards me carefully, studying me, trying to read the emotion behind my expression, wondering silently if I was right to be busying myself worrying about her when really, it is only me that I should be concerned about.

"Have fun and make some friends, alright?"

"Okay, _mom_." She rolls her eyes but smirks at me; a motion that I reciprocate. "It was nice meeting you, Finn..." She turns towards the tall boy, speaking politely, but her voice is suddenly shy and barely rises above a whisper. Her eyes are averted. She can't even bring herself to look at him when she speaks and I can't help but to notice as her cheeks flush a little pink... I work very hard to keep a straight face. "Quin..."

And with one final nod towards my direction, she turns. I watch her until she disappears amidst the crowd and steps behind the door.

"Oh, _there's_ Sam."

Noah's proclamation snaps me back to attention. I follow his eyes towards the street just as the roar of a revving car overwhelms my senses and a raised, jet-black Ford pickup peels into the senior parking lot.

"He has been late every day so far this year, I swear." I pick up on their conversation, listening in pieces on account of the fact that I had absolutely no idea what they were talking about.

"It's not like him, dude. Ever since he started dating Brittney, he's been slacking." Finn shakes his head, as if in mock disappointment regarding his friends' apparently chronic tardiness. "She's the one that's making him late like this all the time."

"Shit, I'd be late every day too if I were dating Brittney Pierce."

"I guess you got a point there." Finn nods. His voice trails off into a dreamy ghost. It is obvious that he is fantasizing about the possibilities of what he _would_ do if he had a girl like Brittney Pierce – whoever this girl may be – around to be making him late. I am not surprised when the blonde girl, who had been introduced to me as Finn's girlfriend, Quinn, gives him a quick and rough smack against the shoulder in response to his sudden forgetfulness that he too, had a girlfriend.

And she was sitting right behind him.

"Ow, Jesus!"

Shaking my head, I turn to watch the newly approached truck, curious as a blonde boy steps from the driver's seat. Like the rest of them, he is the perfect depiction of a typical high school jock with his bleach-blonde hair that falls at just the right length over his eyes and muscles that I can see even through his Letterman jacket. It is not the first time that I find myself thinking – _How the hell did I end up with these people?_

I am so distracted by this Sam character that I don't even notice his passenger at first. In fact, when we finally do make eye contact, it is by complete chance.

Although I choose to normally avoid direct confrontation at all costs for simplicity sake, the second that I lay eyes on her, I can feel my heard dropping into my feet and I know immediately, I wouldn't be able to look anywhere else even if I wanted to.

My jaw slackens on its own accord, leaving my mouth wide open like one of those cartoon characters that walk around with their tongues dragging on the floor behind them. I am well aware of just how stupid I must look right now, but for some reason, I can't seem to stop. The tunnel vision is immediate. The second that my eyes dance across her features, it is as though it were the first time that I had ever seen anything ever. My heart is thumping prominently inside of my chest. I am almost certain that she can hear it all the way from where she stands across the parking lot so that I know the truth about me is bound to be revealed at any given moment.

This _Brittney_, this beautiful specimen of a female is tall and lean, toned like a quality athlete, yet not too much so, so that her cheerleading uniform outlines her body perfectly enough that it makes my head spin. When she steps out of the car, the sun glows over her head like a halo.

How fitting.

Her dimples taunt me. I am forced to look away or else I know I might do something that I will later regret, something that will only just embarrass me, and... Oh God. She is walking this way.

"Hellooo." I am snapped back into reality by a sing song and a large hand waving in front of my face. "Earth to Santana!" Blinking rapidly, I turn just in time to see the small group congregated in a circle around me, chuckling amongst each other.

They are laughing at me already. Great.

"What?" I cock my head to the side, sounding slightly dumb founded so that now, not only will they think of me as the world's biggest loser, they will also think me as the world's biggest idiot.

Just what I needed right now.

"Sam, Santana. Santana, Sam." Noah skips past the formalities, creating a crude introduction as he jerks his thumb between me and the blonde boy. He stands hesitant, several paces in front of me, keeping his distance just in case – wary. His hands are shoved inside of his pockets, his shoulders hunched as he grins sheepishly towards me and attempts to construct a good initial impression simply on a first glance alone.

Ugh, was everybody around here popular and perfect and beautiful? It was certainly starting to seem that way.

"And I'm Brittney."

The blonde girl catches me off guard. I turn to my right and before I know what's hit me, that beautiful, blonde face is standing directly in front of my own. Through the corner of my eye, I can see that she has stuck her hand out towards me politely, extending it for me to shake. I consider myself grateful as I'll ever be that my body is able to process this long enough to reciprocate the motion so that I don't make a complete and total fool out of myself.

"I'm, uh... I... I'm..."

I guess I spoke too soon.

"Santana?"

"Yeah." I try to mask my temporary forgetfulness with a nervous laugh, try to break the tension and play it off as though I didn't just forget my own damn name. "That's it."

"Are you okay, Santana?"

"Me? Yeah." I speak a little bit too quickly, a little bit too forced to be entirely believable. "Why wouldn't I be?"

"You know, it is okay to be a little bit nervous on your first day at William McKinley."

"Nervous?" I choke on the breath that I have been holding, so relieved that this is what she believes to be my biggest problem and not the fact that I have just fallen head over heels in love with this girl at first sight. Nervous? Yeah, I was nervous alright, but suddenly it was _not_ about the prospect of my first day at William McKinley High School as much as it was about being in the presence of a Godess. "Uh... yeah, I guess I am a little bit."

"Well don't be." Brittney smiles in a comforting gesture, swinging around so that we are side by side, close enough that she can read the class schedule that I have clutched between my hands from over my shoulder. Close enough so that my heart skips a beat and I temporarily stop breathing. Her eyes scan the paper briefly, pausing only when she spots something that seems to be appealing to her. "You've got first period English with me, Puck, and Finn."

"Oh..." It is all that I can manage right now, because suddenly the sun is shining directly over her head, highlighting her beautiful blonde hair as well as ever extravagant feature about her, leaving it difficult for me to find the words to truly express how deeply I feel about this revelation. She turns to face me. Her eyes are bright, and when they look into my own I can tell that my expression gives away the idea that I would never want to look anywhere else but at her again if I could. She just smiles. It's the type of smile that a girl has when the entire world is her own and she knows it. Suddenly, I am not so sure if I really did like her, of if I just envied her confidence, the way she was able to carry herself in a manner that I couldn't even dream of.

"Hey, are you two ready to go over there or what? You and Sam made us late enough as it is."

I am spared from making an even bigger fool out of myself in front of Brittney by Noah beckoning us forward, forcing me to shake my head out of my daze long enough to actually be able to drag myself to my first class of my William McKinley High School career, and although I had spent the last couple of weeks dreading more than anything, those harrowing first steps towards my brand new high school, it was suddenly seeming like it would not be all that bad.

"Yeah, I'm ready!" I am almost disappointed when Brittney turns from me without so much as a second thought, skipping from me and towards her boyfriend, whom she locks arms with from behind, hugging her hips close into his own, swaying them tauntingly as she is escorted to class.

Sighing heavily, I look down, defeated. _Maybe in another life, Santana_.

"Are you good?" Noah turns his attention onto me, smiling gently at my wide-eyed stare and dejected look, probably figuring that it had something to do with my nerves regarding my dramatic introduction to the Lima public school system and nothing more. "You're looking a bit... overwhelmed."

"I'm fine." I force a smile, figuring it best not to mention on my very first day here that I have just been swept off of my feet by a very popular, very blonde, very _female_ cheerleader that I knew I could never have.

This whole concept, this whole experience, it was all brand new territory for me. I have never been swept off of my feet. I have never felt as though I had a swarm of butterflies fluttering around inside of my stomach, just pushing to get out. I have never been rendered speechless in the presence of someone before, _especially _someone like Brittney... You know – a girl.

I just figured that my first day amidst brand new, seemingly genuine friends wouldn't be the best place to open up about my sudden sexuality crisis.

These flaws, they are something that I cannot afford to be shown right now. I am _not_ willing to lose these guys as friends before I've even really had the opportunity to have them. I was craving a trite and true relationship with somebody that wasn't my own family, craving the feeling of finally fitting in. I wanted it – no – I _needed_ it right now. Failure was not an option.

When I had lived in Boston, I used to watch all of the popular girls in envy, secretly hoping that they never were as happy as they always looked... But deep down, I knew that they were and I wished that one day, I could be just like them – happy – too.

"Well then..." Noah just shrugs. He extends his elbow out towards me, relaying the silent offer for me to latch onto him, using him as an escort as Sam and Brittney, and Finn and Quinn had before us. I smile in appreciation. My cheeks flush red, slightly overwhelmed by this display of generosity being extended towards me but accept the offer, preparing to make my way inside of William McKinley High School for the first time in my life, dangling off of the arm of none other than Noah "Puck" Puckerman himself.

"Let's get going."


	3. Half Way to Happy

**Sorry this chapter was a bit delayed. I had the opportunity to see my family during the Easter holiday for the first time in a couple of months and snagged it. I did try to make this chapter a bit longer to try and make up for it. Thank you all once more for all of your encouraging words of support! And to the reviewer that pointed out I was spelling Brittany wrong, I'm sorry! My mom's name is Britteny with an E so I'm biased :) I fixed it all in this chapter though (I think). Another shout out to beans008, I'm jealous of you being in Boston. I lived in that city for five years and fell in love with it (although I am from the New York area and am a very dedicated Yankees fan so I would never admit to this out loud)**

Chapter 3 – Half Way to Happy

In a bizarre twist of fate that I am certain a damn fortune teller couldn't have predicted for me, by the time the lunch bell rings, I feel invincible.

I am bombarded with an unfamiliar sense of pride, overwhelmed with all of these new people that I have met, the generosity that they have given to me. Being gathered up into Puck's arms like an apprentice of friendship and popularity, guided by the hand around the school with a step-by-step guide on _exactly_ how I can fit in, has proven very helpful.

The second that the lunch bell rings, the hallway floods with students, all rushing from their classrooms and into the halls like the walls of the Red Sea closing down against the Egyptians. The volume swells; hundreds of students chatting and laughing, giddy in their excitement to spend the next forty-six minutes out of a classroom before they are beckoned right back into it.

I am pleased to say that I am among them. I had planned on something very different.

"Hey Finn, look it's your sister." Intrigued by Puck's comment, I follow his pointing finger into the crowd, expecting to find a tall, goofy-looking girl, identical to Finn asides from being female. I am surprised to see only a small, fragile looking boy with pale skin, perfectly coiffed hair, and an outfit that you'd be able to find in a fashion magazine, walking towards our direction with his hand interlaced around another boy's.

"Real cute, _Noah_." The boy guides an exaggerated eye roll in our direction, purposefully emphasizing Puck's God-given birth name, because even I know how much he hates to be called that in front of his peers who have apparently always known him only as Puck.

"Whatever, lady-boy." Puck snickers at his own self-prescribed nickname before he lowers his shoulder and shoves his thick frame into the much smaller boy. The contact can be considered no more than a soft love-tap, but the prominent difference in sheer body mass between the two makes it seem like a full-on hip check that sends this boy – Finn's brother – flying into the lockers.

He bounces off with a loud grunt that is nearly masked by the metallic bang of skin against metallic clang of skin against metal revebrating down the length of the hallway. The boy is thrown off balance, stumbling slightly so that his boyfriend is left scrambling to be the sturdy crutch that he needs to gather hold of his footing.

"Not cool, dude." Finn comes to his brother's defense half a second too late. The boy has already managed to come back to his footing, and this time when he stands, he does so in a manner that makes him look a foot taller than anybody else, his eyes narrowing inward towards Puck.

For a second, I think that this much smaller boy is going to try to hit him and I flinch for fear that I am going to be forced to sit here and watch him get his ass kicked just for standing up for himself. Silently, I am in awe. I can only wish to ever be that brave. Instead, I only sit here thinking about how glad I am that I hadn't jumped the gun in informing anybody that I was crushing on Brittany so hard that I couldn't even bring myself to so much as speak in front of her without growing nervous.

_That could be me being shoved into those lockers. That could be me bearing the names that I wasn't strong enough to hold on my own shoulders. _I think. _Again_.

"Finn, you should be careful with all of the football that you and your friends have been playing. The symptoms of all of the head injuries are starting to show." This is how he chooses to fight back, nose turned upwards, eyes shimmering with confidence. Silently, I cheer him on as I continue to blend into the background. "Can you control your barbaric friends, please?" Without another word, he turns his back upon us, latching determinedly onto his boyfriend's hand once more and walks away, making sure that every last one of us is well aware that he is not going to let anybody or anything get in the way of him showing the world who it is that he truly loves.

"Whatever Kurt, you know that I'm only messing around!" Puck shouts after his turned back. "Only I'm allowed to give you hell, and if anybody else tries to fuck with either one of you, come talk to me and they'll have to answer to the Puckster!" He speaks loudly, making sure that everybody within the vicinity of the hallway can hear him as he puffs out his chest and points his thumb hard into his own sternum as if to assert his dominance in his stance of being the one and only tormentor in this Kurt kid's life.

Kurt doesn't respond, only moves with an extra swagger behind his step and swing in his hips. Puck turns back towards me. His smile hasn't faltered once amidst that entire interaction.

"That's Finn's step-brother, Kurt. He's so gay though that he's pretty much Finn's step-sister. His mom married Kurt's dad two years ago."

I raise an eyebrow at Puck's crude explanation. "Oh." Is the only thing that I am able to manage, because all of a sudden, my head is spinning in circles. If there is one thing that this brief interaction between Puck and Kurt has taught me, it is that I am nothing if not very, very confused.

I had spent my entire morning thinking that I was easily fitting in with this _in_ crowd, believing that my senior year here at William McKinley High School would in fact be smooth-sailing after all, easy in comparison to the last eleven years that I had spent in Boston. My sudden inability to distinguish exactly where my new found friends truly stood on the truth that was inside of me was starting to give me a migraine. Of course, if I just _asked_... No, that wasn't an option.

_Just keep your mouth shut, Santana._

I follow the crowd down the length of the hallway, trailing in the back, silenced by my wariness in the distinction that maybe I really was stupid for ever thinking that I could fit into this crowd.

I stand a couple of paces behind Finn and Noah. They are laughing among each other, joking and carrying on, completely unaware of me, of Kurt and his boyfriend, of everybody else around them... I wonder if Finn's brother is lingering on his being pestered and harassed by the higher-heads of William McKinley as much as I am, or if they are so used to it by now that they've already brushed it off as yet another incident. I wonder if I am the only one still thinking about any of it.

The closer we get to the cafeteria, the more nervous I become. In my old high school, the cafeteria was the center of the hierarchy, the capital of the universe, the bane of my daily embarrassments. During lunch, I was as vulnerable as ever; I didn't have a classroom to hide behind, a desk to blend into, just a whole bunch of people with their whole bunch of friends and then me.

By myself, I was always an easy target. I have learned to take the cafeteria with so much caution and tension inside of my muscles that by the time the first period of the afternoon began, I was getting cramps and spasms as I sat inside of my desk.

And you know what they say about old habits.

I try to convince myself that among this group, I cannot be touched. But my reservations grow prominent. I am cautious in the reminder that being on the top of the totem pole for one morning does not secure my place here. I guess that I have always been aware of _how_ exactly a person manages to make their way to the top, I've just never really considered before how it would effect my conscious once I was finally at the other end of it all.

When we round the corner of the corridor that leads to the cafeteria, there is a large commotion going on right outside of its doors. A large crowd has found itself gathering, characterized by a lot of jeers and snickers, laughter in the distance that sounds anything but friendly...

A girl is trying desperately to push her way to the outside from the center, head ducked low into her chest, clearing a path in the hoard of bodies that surrounds her. A line of larger boys, all adorned in matching varsity jackets stands beside the crowd, leaning up against the wall pointing and laughing, congratulating one another on whatever act of terror they had clearly just committed. In their hands, they each carry one of those extra large Big-Gulp cups, the kind my mother always warned me never to buy unless I wanted to have no teeth in my mouth by the time that I hit thirty.

I can't help but notice that they're empty.

"Ah, Slushee attacks." Puck states dreamily as though reminiscing about times well spent between him and the sugary beverage. "One of William McKinley's greatest past times."

"What is it?" I ask skeptically because not even I am entirely certain I want to hear the answer.

"A ritual." Puck's explanation is vague as he places a hand on my shoulder and points.

I follow his finger, leading towards a scrawny girl with big, bushy hair and glasses that are fogged with tears, fleeing past us, her face buried inside of her hands in an effort to prevent anybody from seeing that she is crying although that much is obvious. Her frizzy, blonde hair is stained blue, her clothes soaking wet and dripping. As she rushes towards the nearest bathroom that she can find, she drips a trail of red ice chips behind in her wake. I am overwhelmed with the scent of strawberries by the time she is within ten feet of me.

I shiver as though I myself have just been doused with three extra large, frozen Slushees. Metaphorically speaking, I feel like I may just as well have.

My insides feel frozen.

"They threw that on that girl?" My voice sounds horrified. I can't seem to get that image of that poor girl out of my head, rushing past me with a terrible combination of Slushee and tears welling deep inside of her eyes.

"Well, yeah." Puck shrugs my terror off as though it is unwarranted through an obvious explanation. "It's a right of passage, Santana. It's a way for the seniors to remind the freshman that they have to earn their spot here. It's a way for us to remind the geeks of where they rank in the scheme of things... Remember when I told you to never, ever join the glee club? Well this is why."

"Sounds medieval." I raise an eyebrow skeptically.

"Exactly." Puck smiles, brightening over the idea that I finally seem to be understanding where it is that he is coming from although I don't think that the two of us have interpreted my statement in the same manner. I bite my tongue against reminding him that in Medieval times, they also used to draw and quarter people in the town square and burn people at the stake just for fun.

Not that I was comparing the two.

"Will _I_ get Slusheed?" I ask, slightly nervous for the prospect of the answer because if this truly was a right of passage here at William McKinley, and I was the new girl on the block, than I was bound to get it eventually... _Especially_ when they inevitably found out that I was a fraud amongst them this entire time.

_It's a way for us to remind the geeks of where they rank in the scheme of things._

"Stick with us, and the only thing that you'll ever have to worry about is which flavor to buy in order to throw on somebody else." Noah makes his assurance and I plaster the best smile that I can manage given the circumstances on my face. Suddenly, I am torn between feeling badly for everybody that has ever fallen victim to a Slushee attack and feeling eternally grateful that it is not me.

What kind of monster does that make me?

"Hey, there's Sam, Quinn and Brittany come on, let's go." Finn jerks Puck and I apart from our life lesson on high school survival, pointing towards a table in the center of the cafeteria where the trio are already sitting, Sam devouring a tray full of food as Quinn and Brittany pick away at their salads without ever actually eating a single bite. I stare down self-consciously towards the brown paper bag that I have clutched inside of my hand and wonder what they will think of me if I choose to eat in front of them.

Christ, being popular was already proving to be hard and it was only my first day.

"Hey Santana, over here!" When Brittany calls me over to her, patting at the empty seat besides her, my heart skips a beat. I try very hard to put a neutral look on my face, to dissolve that dazed grin as I lower myself into the bench besides her, and begin to pull out my lunch, but I am finding the task to be very difficult.

What I had been worrying myself over again?

"How has your first day been so far?"

"Not bad." I shrug because although I am very conscious of the fact that I had been extremely bothered by something only moments ago, I am suddenly finding it very difficult to remember what that problem was in the first place. Did I only say that my day thus far had been _not bad_? Well, I take that back. My day thus far, has been absolutely perfect.

"Nothing to be worried about, you see? What did I tell you?" She smiles at me and when she does, it is as though the entire world screeches to a halt. "So what do you think about the guys here? Have you found any that interest you yet?"

She asks me this just as I take a nice, big bite of my sandwich. Her question throws me off enough that I cough on it and end up swallowing the entire bite whole. My throat plugs up momentarily, a nice, big ball of deli meat and bread clogging my esophagus, making my eyes water and my face turn beet-red. I try to be discrete as possible as I ball up my hand into a fist and pound against my own sternum, trying to urge the food down its proper route, but Brittany's face furrows with concern and to my utmost embarrassment, she reaches behind me and pats ferociously at my back.

"W-what?" I finally manage to stutter, only after I can actually breathe again and that clot of food becomes nothing more than a sharp throbbing sensation lingering in the pit of my core.

"Uh... any boys." Brittany repeats herself, although she eyes me as though I am insane. I wonder how long she will try to act nice to me after all I can manage to do is chronically embarrass myself in front of her. "Have you found any that you like yet?"

"Um, well..." I stutter over my own thoughts. Yes, I can breathe again at least, but I can still feel my face, glowing red with heat from sheer embarrassment. My eyes scan the cafeteria, darting wildly in an effort to come up with a believable lie. I am trying desperately to control my thoughts, conscious of the fact that I must come up with a quick lie before my brain can spew the truth from my mouth. Brittany's eyes follow my own, she watches me just as I manage to lock eyes with Puck. He smiles at me politely. I stare back like a wide-eyed moron, still too frantic and blind-sided to match the gesture.

Brittany interprets this in much the wrong way. Her eyes glisten immediately.

"You know, Puck is recently single." She says this in with a mock swoon behind her voice. I think immediately of Rachel in the bathroom with me this morning – _Santana Puckerman! Santana Puckerman!_

"Oh?" I fiend interest, my voice so high-pitched that you'd practically need the ears of a dog to hear it.

"I can hook the two of you up, if you want." Brittany informs me. "I'm a fantastic match-maker. I'm the reason that Finn and Quinn got together, isn't that right Q?"

"Yeah." Quinn throws in her comment, but she sounds uninterested by our whole conversation. It is not the first time today that I have been given the impression that Quinn doesn't like me very much, that she was able to see right through my disguise... I only wonder how much longer it will be before she manages to expose me.

"Uh... sure." I take up Brittany on her offer to hook and bait Puck for me because I am in a jam and I'm not entirely sure what else I can do in order to get out of it. "Thanks, I guess."

"What about any clubs?" Brittany doesn't seem to notice a problem in my nervous demeanor. Instead, she carries on with the basics surrounding my first day, twittering on about all of the necessities that she has obviously deemed more important than judging my character. "Have you found any interesting ones yet?"

"Not really -"

"You should join the Cheerios!" She cuts me off before I can even finish my sentence, speaking so quickly that I am made immediately aware of the fact that this had been her plan to segue into requesting my participation in the cheerleading squad all along. "We're the best of the best, and not just at William McKinley, but in the whole country. We win Nationals pretty much every single year, mostly because Quinn is so good that she got captain even though she's only a freshman."

"You're a freshman?" I turn towards Quinn, my interest in my decision on whether or not to join the Cheerios waning on the news that Quinn Fabray was not in fact in the same grade as me, as I had thought the entire time but instead, in the same grade as my little sister.

She gives me a stiff, curt nod in reply.

"My sister's a freshman." The topic of Rachel seems to make me more talkative than I have found myself all of lunch. I have not seen much of Rachel since we'd parted ways in the senior parking lot earlier this morning, other than a couple quick passings-by in the hallway in which she told me she was doing fine, but I am curious to know of her welfare, feeling comforted in knowing that I have people within my circle of friends that can look out for her, get to know her, keep all of us in the same group... "Have you had any classes with Rachel?"

She makes a face as though she has just eaten something incredibly sour. I'm not entirely sure how to interpret this. "No." Is all she says to me, and just like that the topic is dead.

"Well, Q and I are both on the Cheerios. Plus, Sam, Finn, and Puck are all on the football team together. And you know what that means?" She sings Puck's name airily as though to remind me that she hasn't forgotten that she had self-assigned herself as our matchmaker. My face glows red. I _had_ forgotten. I wish she would to.

Ugh, why does everybody think that I like this guy?

"Coach Sylvester is a bit of a slave driver when it comes to practices and stuff though, so at least that will actually give us the opportunity to hang out a little bit more."

"Coach Sylvester?" I question, suddenly even more skeptical about the idea of joining the Cheerios than I was even before with the addition of that crazed woman that I'd met only this morning thrown in the mix. "Is that that psycho with bull horn?"

"That's the one." Brittany nods without hesitation... I guess that Coach Sylvester's antics were a lot more commonplace than just the isolated incident that I saw this morning when she had been trying to get kids to move to their classes faster with nothing but a megaphone and a leather crop. "Come on, what do you say?"

"Uh... I guess that I'll give it a try."

Sure, I had my reservations, but you know what, why not?

"Excellent!" Brittany beams, slapping her hands together so hard, the resulting clap hurts my ears. "Do you have any routines in mind to try out with? Like from your old cheerleading squad or something?"

My eyebrows raise so high that they disappear into my hairline and I damn near choke on my lunch for the second time within the last couple of minutes alone in response to Brittany automatically assuming that I have been a cheerleader all my life. "From my old cheerleading squad?" I question; my way of employing tact when what I really mean to say is – _Do you really think that I have ever been on a cheerleading squad before in my life?_

"Yeah." Brittany nods as though this much is obvious. "In Boston."

"Um... uh..." I stutter briefly. A part of me wants to admit to her that no, I do not have a routine, in fact, I have never cheered a day in my life. The other part of me was screaming not to ruin this good thing before it could even start. I settle on lying, because what's another to add to the list, right? "Yeah, I guess."

"Excellent!" `She beams. "Don't worry, we'll go over a couple of things during our study hall together last period. Try outs are after school in the gym, and if you want, right after that, we have a meeting with the celibacy club."

"The celibacy club?" I question immediately, because this entire thing was getting more and more outrageous with each passing moment.

"Yeah. Quinn is the president of that, too." I scan between the two blondes; Brittany to Quinn, Quinn back to Brittany. They were the last two people in this school that I would ever think to be such a prominent part of a club named for its strict adherence to abstinence. This seemed sketchy. Sure, I _was_ a virgin, of course I was. The only boyfriend that I had ever had – Tommy Moore - I'd only had because he was dared to ask me out by his friends. The thing was, I was not exactly committed to staying a virgin for the remainder of my high school career.

Maybe if there was a _Celibate by Default Because Nobody in Their Right Mind Wants to Touch You_ club, I could be president of that, but as it was, I was actively trying to put that life behind me.

My eyes lock with Quinn's. It is only now that I notice the gold cross plastered against the center of her chest, glistening in the fluorescent lighting dangling above us. I immediately wonder how it is possible that I have managed to be in her presence for this long without being immediately stricken to hell.

"Of course, joining the celibacy club _is_ a choice." Quinn passes this information along, using a tone that informs me that joining the celibacy club was in fact, not a choice. Not if I wanted to be a Cheerio anyway. Not if I wanted to be popular. "But just remember, that wherever you go wrong, you are always with God, and He will always no."

Quinn lectures me like my Sunday school teacher used to when I was a child. As it was, I'd already gotten more than enough of that from her. I am unfazed.

"Yeah..." I feel a sarcastic retort building in the pit of my throat despite myself. "But He can't find me if I'm already lost, can He?"

Brittany laughs. Quinn only scoffs. "I guess we shouldn't be expecting you then?"

I shrug. The way I figure it, if it made Quinn Fabray happy like it used to make my father happy, like its forced itself into making my mom happy, than they can all keep wasting their time kneeling in the pews of their churches week after week. Me, well I had decided to stand up a long time ago, and now that I had, I wasn't trying to go back down there. Not anytime soon, anyway. What could being a part of a stupid little club hurt, right?

"I'll be there."

"I knew it!" Brittany is beaming. I try to push the idea out of my head that this is because she is ecstatic about the prospect of us spending more time with one another because in reality, I'm sure that it has nothing more to do with the fact that she has just recruited another potential Cheerio to add to her national-champion ranks.

Even a Cheerio that has never Cheerio'd a day in her entire life.

Through the corner of my eye, I suddenly spot Rachel making her way into the cafeteria, looking like a deer in the headlights, wide-eyed and head scanning in search of a place to sit.

"I'll be right back." I announce, pushing myself up and out of my seat, grateful for the opportunity to get away for a moment or two before I can be recruited into any more obscure clubs. "Hey Rachel!" I shout, rushing towards her. It is the first time that I have seen an opportunity to really talk to my sister, to see how she was adapting to this new life in this new school.

Seeing how Quinn Fabray had not been a very reliable source of this information, I was eager to find out for myself.

"Whats up, San?" I try to judge her mood based on the tone in her voice alone. She seems cheerful enough, but knowing Rachel what is usually showing on the outside is remarkably different from what she is feeling on the inside. It is an uncanny ability that all three Corcoran woman have managed to posses; hiding our emotions.

Let's just say living among the three most stubborn woman in history... well, it is an everyday struggle that I was still trying to figure out myself.

"Nothing," I shrug, trying to act casual. "Just wondering how school was going for you so far."

"Not bad." Rachel is vague. She gives me absolutely no detail onto what _not bad_ actually entails.

Do you see what I mean?

"Just not bad?"

"Well, I haven't had to come running for my big sister to come and save me yet so that's always a good thing, right?" She smiles and I return it, pleased. She does have a point there.

"Yeah..." I nod in recognition of our good fortune here in Lima thus far. "So, have you made any new friends yet?"

"A few." She shrugs. "I see that you're not doing so bad in the friend department yourself." Rachel nods her head over towards the table that I had just come from – cheerleaders gossiping among each other, football studs shoveling food into their mouths as they show off the progress of the muscles they were attempting desperately to build... The look on Rachel's face is more than enough to express my feelings on the entire situation.

_Who would have thought?_

"Yeah, about that... Listen, I'm gonna stay late after school today so that I can try out for the Cheerios so you may have to take the bus home."

Rachel's reaction is expected. She turns her head down, brows furrowing at the center of her forehead as her eyes focus inward directly onto me. The look in her eyes is nothing more than pure skepticism. A part of me wants to take her advice. The other just wants to roll my eyes and remind her that _I'm_ the big sister here, not her.

"Are you serious?"

"Why not?" I shrug. Rachel only glares at me with a look as though to silently inform me that she can in fact, give me a million reasons as to _why not_. "Come on, it'll be fun. You should try out with me!"

I am expecting it when she snorts in her laughter, but that does not mean that it hurts any less. I have never before in my life had anything less than one hundred percent support from Rachel. She was the only person that has ever believed in me every single second of every single day.. Were things really changing that quickly around here?

"No thanks."

"Come on, it'll be fun!" I am begging because I need her support on this one and I refuse to pretend otherwise. Rachel and I, we may have been born three years apart, but still, we come as a duo. From the day that we were born until the day that we die, Rachel is my biggest fan, and I am hers. Even with popularity, friends, boyfriends, glamour, all of that, without Rachel, I am nothing.

"No way, San." She speaks with a tone of finality and I sink, defeated. "Besides, I think that I'm gonna go try out for the glee club after school today."

"The glee club?"

My tone is instantly judgmental and it makes me feel like a hypocrite. But I can't help myself. My mind immediately jumps to everything that Puck had said to us this morning in his car.

_ "Emphasis on staying away from the glee club."_

"Yeah." She shrugs, as if to say _might as well_. "I mean... I know that Noah said that the glee club is only for total losers, but I've already made a couple of friends that are all in glee and they can't stop ranting and raving about it so I figured that I'd give it a try. Besides, a lead position in my high school glee club will look fantastic on my resume when I audition for my first Broadway role."

At this, I can't help but to smile. Sometimes I can't help but wonder how much easier my life would be if I, like my sister, could look ahead and know the future simply by staring off into the clouds. Rachel, she was addicted to her future; always living months ahead, miles down the road. I envied her for this, but like I said, Rachel is the one that inherited all of the talent from my family. Rachel is the one that taught me how to convince myself of the impossible. Maybe that's why I stand before you today, shrouded by a group of football stars and cheerleaders.

If only the kids at St. Augustine Prep could see me now.

Maybe Rachel was right. Maybe it _was_ important to stop every once in a while and watch the sky brewing over head, even if you couldn't exactly read what it was that it had in store for your future.

"Whatever makes you happy, Rach." I tell her. "But only if you have some front row seats reserved for me for when you make your Broadway debut."

"Of course." She nods in her promise, solidifying the deal. "And thanks, by the way... I guess that you should do whatever makes you happy too."

"Hey, Rachel!"

I am surprised when somebody that is not me begins to vie for my little sister's attention. Curious, I look past her shoulder towards the direction of the voice and immediately spot that same pale boy from before – Kurt – and his boyfriend, the one with the slicked back hair and bowtie waving for Rachel to come and join them.

I turn back towards Rachel, content that she too has at least managed to come out of the day with a few new people by her side; an unusual character trait for the both of us.

_"A fresh start." _I remember what my mother had told us the day that she had informed her two, horrified daughters that we were packing up our every belonging and leaving the only home we'd ever known for Lima, Ohio. _"It's time that we all set out to find our new, fresh start."_

When I focus back in on Rachel, she is looking at my with puppy dog eyes, as if to silently ask permission to leave me to go enjoy her new friends.

"Go." I nod her off because I have been hogging her all to myself now for the last fourteen years, and as difficult as it was to let her go, I figured that it was about time I started sharing. "I'll meet up with you back home, okay?"

"Okay." She nods, wasting no time in turning away from me in order to rush back towards her friends. I watch her take a handful of steps at a jogging pace before she stops, reconsidering and turns back towards me one last time. "Love you, San."

"You better." I tell her, before waving her off with my hand, silently indicating for her to get going. She smiles brightly towards me one last time before turning back towards her friends. This time, she doesn't turn back around.

A fresh start.

I have never felt more nervous in my entire life than I did right here, right now; standing inside of the gymnasium of William McKinley High School, sporting some ridiculous work-out outfit that I couldn't picture _anybody_ exercising in unless they were exercising on a stripper pole, waiting for Sue Sylvester to call my name and announce my turn to embarrass myself in front of the entire school.

"Santana Corcoran!"

I swallow heavily before stepping forward, making my way into the center of the gymnasium where I stop directly in front of a long table that has been set up on the sidelines.

Sue Sylvester sits front and center, looking more threatening than ever wearing a lime green track suit and a permanent scowl that only highlights her prominent bone structure. Quinn is directly to her right, still dressed in her Cheerios uniform. She is stone-faced. I don't think that I would be able to read what it is that she is thinking about me even if I sat here and stared at her for the rest of my senior year. On Quinn's other side, sits Brittany. I watch as she gives me an enthusiastic thumbs up. The motion leaves me smiling, relaxed... a little bit, anyway.

"Who the hell are you, Sand Bags?" Coach Sylvester barks into her megaphone, the harshness behind her tone, the fire inside her eyes leaving me nervous all over again. My heart is pounding inside of my chest once more. At the rate that I'm going, I will consider myself lucky if I don't drop dead of a heart attack by the end of the day.

"Uh... Santana Corcoran." I speak tentatively. For Christ's sake, I can't even say my own damn name with so much as an air of confidence. "I'm new."

"Alright then, New Girl, let's see if you can make it two whole minutes without me wanting to gauge my eyes out of my skull with a dull pick-axe." Coach Sylvester holds the stop watch up threateningly, thumb already dancing across the starter button at the top. "Nobody has done so yet. As it is, I have already sent my co-captain, Becky to the hardware store so unless you want my blindness on your hands for the rest of your life, I suggest you impress me."

I am not entirely sure what an appropriate response to this would be, but luckily, it appears that Coach Sylvester was not looking for one anyway. She waves her hand towards me and clicks the button on the top of her stop watch, falling silent.

I take that as my cue.

I take a couple of steps backwards and stagger my feet, breathing deeply as the music begins to gradually build through the overhead speakers. I am trying to concentrate on controlling my nerves so that I may focus instead on the moves that Brittany had shown me no more than an hour ago, but all I can seem to repeat over and over again inside of my head is – _What the hell was I thinking?_

The song starts off slow. It seems only vaguely familiar, although I must have heard it over a thousand times in the study hall period that me and Brittany had spent prepping for this very moment. I shift my weight back and forth onto my feet, warming them up, getting a feel for the movements. Unlike my mother who had been a star on the Broadway stage in another life, and my sister who aspires to be able to say the same, I have never been a comfortable performer. Instead, I am embarrassed by the prospect of dancing in front of a group of people that might as well be strangers. My knees are wobbling and I can only be grateful that after a couple of carefully coordinated seconds, they begin to wobble in actual, distinctive, and purposeful movements.

The beat of the bass drum is pounding inside of my head, not quite painful but still far from comfortable. I force myself to ignore it. Like the flip of a light switch, I manage to turn myself onto autopilot, I manage to see nothing in front of me; no Sue Sylvester, no Quinn, not even any Brittany... Instead, I follow the rhythm. My feet glide, twist and turn in every right direction, moving on their own accord. I am gliding on air.

My lungs are burning with the exaggerated, aerobic movements, my muscles stretching to their maximum capacity to perform what I am asking of them; lunges and pirouettes, jumps and splits and twists and turns, but I barely feel it.

Quickly, I find – much to my relief – that I am a natural.

"STOP!"

All of that build up of concentration, of distinct focus is ground to a halt. I slide on my heels, coming to a stop, frozen except for the fact that I am panting, exhausted. My legs are shaking from having just spent the last two minutes dancing harder than I have ever been dancing in my entire life.

The first thing that my conscious manages to process is a soft clapping. When my eyes finally come to focus on the table in front of me, I notice that Brittany is grinning from ear-to-ear, clapping her hands together softly. Quinn's expression has not changed one bit, while Coach Sylvester scrunches her face into a look of utmost concentration. For a moment she does not say anything, she does not do anything. I am not entirely sure what it is that I am supposed to be doing myself, so I just stand there, watching as Coach Sylvester picks up her cell phone, dials a single number into her speed dial, and holds the device up to her ear, drumming her fingers against the wooden table as she awaits a reply.

"Becky." She says after a handful of tense, silent seconds. "Cancel that pick ax order. Make sure you still bring me back my protein shake." Just like that, she hangs up the phone. Placing her hands carefully against the edges of the table, she tilts her chin up to look at me. "That is the first time that I hadn't wanted to vomit all day, New Girl."

I exhale violently, taking a huge, audible sigh of relief. I have _never_ been a lucky girl. Not once in my life has things ever gone to my advantage. I especially have never been lucky enough to out-perform a carefully-budded lie I had spent an entire morning constructing about my past. I guess that there is a first time for everything.

My legs wobble and my underarms are damp with sweat. I can feel the perspiration building up against the fabric of Brittany's outfit and am conscious of the fact that I _have_ to wash it before I could ever dream of returning it to her. But at the same time, the endorphins are surging through my blood stream.

I am left totally giddy.

"Thank you."

"Have you ever done this before?"

_No_, I think. Of course, I do not say this.

"I... I was the captain of my cheerleading squad back home."

I hate that I keep having to lie like this, and can't for the life of me understand why my mouth keeps on perpetuating all of these ideas of glamour and popularity in my past life. But I was not thinking of the future. Instead, I was living in the moment. I was walking on air, running on pure adrenaline, and somehow or another, I had managed to allow my performance today to actually support my story rather than expose it for the big, fat lie that it truly was. That old life, I was waving it goodbye, taking an additional step away from it with each and every ie that I told.

"Good, wel you can forget all that because from here on out, you are a Cheerio. From this moment forward until the day that you walk across that stage come graduation, you will be inside of this gymnasium every single morning at 0500 and you will leave it every evening at 1800. You will not consume a single carbohydrate or saturated fat for as long as you are a member of my cheerleading squad, and if I so much as catch wind of you interacting with any of the nerds, geeks, and losers of this school, unless of course it is to throw a delicious, sugar coated, artificially colored beverage in their faces, I will personally escort you off of my team and make sure that not even the janitors will speak to you, is that understood?"

"Uh..." I stammer. The stipulations of being a Cheerio were long and harsh. I wish I had a pen. "Yes?"

"Good." She nods as though this is a verbal contract and the terms have now been finalized. "Q. Get her a uniform." Coach Sylvester snaps her fingers directly in front of Quinn's face, beckoning her to get into motion and do so hastily. The blonde, previously in a daze, snaps back to attention and jumps to her feet.

"Come on." She snarls, nodding with her head in an indication for me to follow her.

I jump into action quickly, but have to move at the pace of a steady jog just to keep up as she darts through the hallways, taking sharp turns around corners and weaving through the small handful of students that had chosen to remain behind long after the final bell has rung for one reason or the other.

The blonde finally stops at a door with a label etched inside of a glossy, glittery, gold star – _Cheerios Supply Closet_. I screech to a halt beside her just as she turns the key inside of the lock. The resounding click echoes across the awkward silence that has emanated between the two of us in the absence of movement. Quinn places her hand against the doorknob and twists, but before she opens the door, she pauses, looking up towards me with narrowed eyes so that I can tell instantly that she has been threatened by my abrupt appearance into a world that she has already created perfectly around herself.

"I just wanted to let you know that this is still my team." She informs me. Her voice is no louder than a whisper, but it still radiates with venom all the same. "One good audition is not going to take all of that away from me."

"Um... I... uh..." I stammer, because I have never been spoken to like this before and Quinn Fabray has just thrown me off of my balance, shoving me roughly from the cloud that I had been floating on since the moment that my audition had ended.

"Don't bother." She stops me before I so much as have the opportunity to start. "I don't know what your deal is, or what you were doing back in Boston, but I'm going to find out. I promise you, I _am_ going to find out."

With that, she uses her shoulder to open the closet door and snakes her way inside of it, leaving me standing dumbstruck in the middle of the hallway.

Quinn Fabray was onto me, and I had the slightest feeling that when she told me that she was going to find out, and subsequently expose my lie for what it truly was, she meant it. I inhale a shaky breath and run my fingers through my hair, crossing my arms in front of my chest, feeling suddenly cold with dread. The way that I was starting to see how things worked around here, either I became somebody that I knew I wasn't, and lived with the fear of that lie being exposed, or I became somebody that nobody wanted, and lived in solitude for the rest of my natural existence.

Either way, I was lost.

I think back to Rachel, standing defiantly in her decision to join the glee club, despite knowing full well, the reputation that it would grant her. I think of her chatting away animatedly with friends who accepted her for who she was, friends who wanted her to be one of them, despite knowing her flaws and her differences. I was proud of the fact that Rachel had managed to figure out for herself, the idea that I will take the roads that I choose to take, and make the decisions that I choose to make – however stupid they may be – while simultaneously trying not to sound like a complete and total hypocrite when I tell her not to follow, not to make the same mistakes that I've made.

Trying desperately to shake my worries to the side, I take a deep breath and follow Quinn into the supply closet so that I may be fitted for my very own, coveted Cheerios uniform.

A part of me thinks that maye I should confront her. That I should corner her in private right here, right now and admit the truth, go ahead and let her know that she has absolutely nothing to worry about, no reason to be threatened by the likes of me.

But I choose to keep my mouth shut because then again, you never do know.

* * *

By the time that I am finished with my first Cheerios practice, or - as I should say more accurately - by the time my first Cheerios practice is finished with me, I cannot even feel my body anymore.

My muscles are so sore that I am forced to walk on the tips of my toes, waddling with my legs spread apart as though I were riding an invisible horse. I'm not entirely sure when a requirement of being a cheerleader became all about judging you on your ability to run five miles and do wall squats until your thigh muscles literally gave out from underneath you, but here I was, staggering out of Sam Evans' car, looking pathetically up the pathway leading to my front door as though it were the longest trek that I have ever had the misfortune of coming across in my entire life.

Ugh.

The only good thing that I have to say about the pain in my legs is that it at least distracted me long enough to get through that God-awful, hour long celibacy club meeting. For the most part, I just sat in the corner with a pair of ice packs on my thighs, so distracted by the pain in my legs, that I'm still not entirely sure what the whole thing is all about.

"You'll get used to it, Santana I promise!"

From the passenger's seat, Brittany catches the wary look that I shoot towards her over the prospect of climbing out of the backseat of Sam's car; just the beginning of my lengthy journey towards the door. Now that I had been comfortably sitting down, getting back up again seemed like an impossible feat.

"Sure." I murmur. I'm not entirely sure that I believe her. In return, she can only laugh at me; that all knowing, _trust me__, I've been there before_ laugh that leaves my already trembling knees shaking only harder. She pulls herself with ease out of the front seat, rounding around the car where she stands directly in front of me and offers me her hand as a support beacon to help pull me out.

I swallow heavily and accept her offer. My grip is hesitant and uncertain. I am shy like I have just been graced with the presence of a celebrity. When she has a firm enough grasp on my hand and provides me with a firm tug, I am still so focused on the fact that she is touching me alone that I practically fall out of the car and right into her.

And trust me, that has absolutely nothing to do with the brutal workout that I had just endured. Luckily, I am able to pass it off as such.

"Damn." Brittany laughs, catching me by the shoulders. "Make sure you ice those things good tonight, huh? Tomorrow is conditioning, it will be even worse."

"Yeah, sure..." I force a laugh. I am feeling suddenly grateful that Coach Sylvester had beaten my muscles into a bloody pulp to at least give me an excuse for swooning, without actually making it obvious that I was indeed swooning. "I'll make sure to do that."

"Okay, well see you tomorrow then?"

"Yeah." I nod as she removes her hands from either one of my shoulders. "I'll see you guys tomorrow."

They drive off, leaving me to attempt to make it up the concrete path on my own accord, moving no faster than a snail's pace. Jesus, by the time I manage to get back inside of my house, it would probably already be time to walk right back out of it to go back to school all over again. But despite the pain still lingering inside of every muscle of my body, I can't help but to move with a happy gait to my step. The day that I had been fearing the most for the last couple of weeks now, the day that I thought would be as catastrophic as a nuclear explosion actually - in a surprise turn of events - managed to not be half as bad as I initially thought.

With a couple of hiccups along the way, of course.

I manage to arrive at my front door quicker than I'd initially anticipated; in about five minutes rather than the five hours that I had been expecting, anyway. Turning my house key inside of the lock, I push the door open expecting to find Rachel, at the very least, still giddy in her excitement from her first day of glee, left walking on air just as the Cheerios had done for me, dancing around, singing, doing whatever it is she is so prone to doing.

Instead, I am met with silence.

This whole thing, it comes across as strange to me and leaves me feeling as though somebody had just doused a bucket of ice water over my head. I swallow heavily. At school today, it was easy for me to forget about all of the problems that had been festering just behind this door. It was easy for me to be foolish enough to feel happy for a change, to forget that my dad was dead, that I was a thousand miles away from home, that my mother was distant, my sister was depressed and I was lost as ever.

It was nice, but at the same time, foolish.

"Mom?" I call out to her but I didn't notice her car in the driveway when I walked in and am willing to bet that she is still busy at Mt. Caramel trying to secure a job that could help put us all back on our feet again. I am not surprised when I don't get a response from her. "Rachel!" Rachel, I am expecting an answer from. Moving through the house, I search for any signs of her, a feeling of dread and worry slowly creeping up my spine. "Rachel?"

I am halfway down the hallway when I hear the unmistakable sound of sniffling coming from inside of the bathroom. I freeze and turn immediately towards the closed door where I pause slightly before knocking.

"Rae?" I call to her gently. "Are you in here?"

There is no answer at the other end, only the hurried motions of somebody who is trying to hide the fact that they had locked themselves away inside of a bathroom to cry. I test the doorknob for myself, happy to find that it is open. I push the door open, only a crack at first.

"Rachel?" I call out to her tentatively as I peer into the small room. I spot my sister immediately, the petite girl standing at the sink directly in front of the mirror, holding with a white-knuckled intensity onto the basin. Her face is swollen, her eyes are red and blotchy as she runs a damp towel through her hair, pulling out the unmistakable, frozen, purple residue of a recent Slushee attack.

"Oh, Rachel..." I sigh, realization dawning across my face as I rush the rest of the way into the bathroom. "What happened?" I reach out a comforting hand towards her direction, trying to help her in pulling the last of the sticky, syrupy mess out of her tangled hair. To my utmost surprise, she only pulls away.

"I don't know, why don't you ask your new friend Quinn Fabray?"

She snaps, which throws me back a bit. I stagger a couple of steps from her and can sense in an instant, that she feels guilty about being so brash. Her muscles slacken, her shoulders hunched with defeat. The fire in her eyes smolders and burns out.

"I'm sorry, Rae." I apologize because I am not really sure what else to say. My mind is racing, my heart pounding with guilt in the reminder that Quinn and I had had an interaction long before the blonde had chosen to douse my little sister with a cold Slushee. I think back to earlier that afternoon, when Quinn had called me out in front of the Cheerios supply closet for threatening to steal her spotlight and overthrow fourteen years of the hard work that it had taken for her to reach the top. Quinn had targeted Rachel for her association with me, I am not stupid to believe anything else. "Do you want me to talk to Quinn?"

"No, that will just make things worse." Rachel sighs, although she must know that I do not plan to just let something like this go unnoticed. She turns towards me, looking at me, _really_ looking at me for the first time since I'd barged in on her crying in the bathroom. Her eyes scan the Cheerio's uniform swaying with every step, my hair fastened into a secure ponytail, the makeup still shimmering against my face from earlier this morning. "I see you made the Cheerios. Congratulations."

"Thanks." I tell her, but my tone only matches her own; dull, unenthusiastic, suddenly wary... If being on the Cheerios meant being forced to throw a Slushee in my little sister's face simply on account of the fact that she had chosen to join the glee club, than I was willing to take it all back in a heartbeat.

Just like that, our conversation fades into an uncomfortable silence. Just looking for something to do with my hands, I grab a hairbrush off of the shelf above the toilet and start to comb it through Rachel's tangled, brown hair, pulling out not only the knots, but also the chunks of purple ice chips weaved in between them.

"Why do you need this so badly, San?" After a couple of moments of pure silence, Rachel finally gathers the courage that she needs to ask the question that has probably been embedded inside of her mind since she'd walked in on me in this exact bathroom, smothering myself with makeup earlier that morning.

I pause, considering my answer for a moment. I haven't really thought about this before now. I don't want to lie to my sister as I have been lying to myself, as I have been lying to everybody else around me all damn day now. For the first time since I had stepped foot onto William McKinley High School's campus earlier that morning, I actually want to tell somebody the truth for a change.

"I don't know. I guess it's because I'm ready for a change, I'm ready to get away from the past and start new. If this is how I have to do it, Rachel than so be it." I shrug and decide to turn the question onto her. "Why do you need the glee club so badly?"

"Because sometimes it's easier to hide behind the music, I guess." Her face settles as she crosses her arms over her chest. I shroud behind her determination, almost embarrassed by her answer. As Rachel's older sister, it was _my_ job to show her the ropes. It was _my_ job to teach her the difference between right and wrong, good and bad. It was _my_ job to be her guide every time she needed direction. Not the other way around.

"Listen, I know that things may not have gone the way that you were hoping it to at school today," I tell her. "But tomorrow is a new day, alright?"

"Sure." She scoffs. It is more than obvious to me, that Rachel does not believe a word that I am telling her.

"Hey, it _will_ be better." I make her this promise, and although I know just as well as she does that I cannot be entirely certain about keeping it, I am damn sure going to try my hardest. "Besides, we're Corcorans, right? We're resilient. We made it this far. You can't let someone like Quinn Fabray drag you down, alright? Trust me, it takes a lot more than a Slushee to keep Rachel Corcoran from standing back up again."

"Thanks, San." She smirks shyly in response to my motivational speech.

"No problem." I assure her, placing the hair brush back down before grabbing onto Rachel's shoulders, flipping her around so that she is forced to face me. "Besides, if anything, know that you will always have your big sister there to have your back, okay?"

"Okay." She smiles at me, and this time, the look on her face is genuine.

"Now go take a shower or something." I am sick of all of this serious talk, this depressing chatter. I attempt to lighten the mood with my mere tone alone, giving Rachel a quick shove towards the direction of the shower.

"You smell like grapes."


	4. Less Yesterday, More Today

**Here's the next one. As always, thank you for everything.**

* * *

**Chapter 4**** –** Less Yesterday, More Today

When I round my way from the bathroom closing the door quietly behind me in an effort to give Rachel some of the privacy that she so much desperately needed rightnow. My ears fill instantly with the sound of water pouring out from the shower head above, muffled by the walls that are separating us. Satisfied, I round into my bedroom.

I leave the door open wide. The prospect of privacy was a concept that was still new, and relatively unnerving to me in its lack of being a consistent habit in my life. I am still much too used to sharing a room with Rachel, too used to being stuck inside of a cramped, two-bedroom apartment with three other people.

Besides, my mother was still at work, far from home, and knowing Rachel, she would be taking her time lacing ice chips out of the tangled rat's nest that that Slushee had transformed her hair into.

I fling myself down against the mattress with a loud, over exaggerated groan, cursing when the sudden movement brings a singing pain into my still aching thigh muscles that manages to burn its way up the length of my spine. My face scrunches with discomfort, a low moan slipping through tightly-sealed lips as I situate my body carefully onto my back in an attempt to find the most comfortable position humanly possible given my current situation.

By the time I am settled, the pain in my legs is nothing more than a soft pounding that comes with each and every beat that my heart sends the blood flushing through my body, gathering the lactic acid, spreading it – it is starting to seem – into every crevice of my body.

Comfort seems in possible. Giving up, I open my eyes with a groan. They focus directly above me against the sticky, glow-in-the-dark stars that every child has had decorating their bedroom at one time or another, plastered against my ceiling. In my defense, they _were_ already here when I moved in, and seeing how I have been busy unpacking and trying to come across as a naturally popular girl to a naturally popular crowd, I haven't exactly had the opportunity to remove them quite yet.

They drip off of the tacky glue that has stuck them to the ceiling for God only knows how long. One of them falls, plummeting gracefully down towards me. Just for the hell of it, I reach out and attempt to catch it but it passes just far from my outstretched fingers

Figures.

I stare at that ceiling for so damn long that my eyes begin to cross and i start to see things that aren't there, until the only thing that I really can do is lose myself inside of my own imagination, drown through these dulcet tones of my own dream state.

After my father died, my mother used to constantly tell me that there was more to life than actually living. I never bothered to remind her that she would be wise to adhere to her own advice because I think that in an effort to keep herself sane, she ultimately tried to focus on helping me to not get caught up in my own reality for fear of losing myself in the process

To be completely honest, I never was entirely sure what she meant whenever she told me that, but now I was starting to figure that it just meant that maybe giving up every once in a while wasn't such a bad thing after all.

But nobody could live like this forever. I knew that happiness and complacency was something that went just as quickly as it came and much more often than not, its departure was premature, and its presence was just too few and far between for anybody's liking.

My mother was experiencing the type of grief where she would wake up on a rainy day and realize that she would prefer things to stay that way forever because if my father could never again understand the meaning of a nice day, than she didn't want to anymore either. She was completely focused on one thing and one thing only – what was and what she knew could never be ever again. I was determined not to fall inside of the same trap. I had learned a long time ago that in the real world, it was the children who were often left sweeping up the messes that their parents left behind.

My mind was begin to swirl with all of my racing thoughts to rapidly that it was starting to give me a migraine. I couldn't get all of the day's events out of my head no matter how hard I tried.

So many things had happened to me today... I am pretty sure that I hadn't had excitement like this in my entire lifetime; between Puck and Brittany, joining the Cheerios, Rachel... Rachel.

What the hell was I going to do about Quinn Fabray?

Maybe it was the throbbing in my legs or the fact that my sister was currently picking out the remnants of her vicious attack, or maybe it was the confrontation that I had with Quinn earlier, the conversation that had subsequently ruined my feelings of invincibility, but I was suddenly feeling very, very bad about this entire situation.

Yeah sure, I had made more friends today than I had ever managed to wrack up in my lifetime thus far, but I had done so under less than honorable conditions and I am starting to get the impression that lying my way into the right group of people did not quite stipulate the fresh start that my mother had in mind every time she talked about it.

Maybe Quinn was right about me.

I exhale steeply and rub my hands up and down hard over my face. My palms dig into my closed eyes, trying to physically press the pain that I was currently feeling pounding behind them.

_Tomorrow. _I tell myself, finally settling on a solution that I am more than certain will be easier said than it will be done. _I will come clean with them. I will admit the truth. I will tell them everything._

_ Tomorrow._

* * *

_It's a beautiful day in South Boston and the Harborwalk on Castle Island is packed to capacity._

_I busy my thoughts with the semi-humorous idea that should there be a fire, a robbery, or else any other kind of emergency in Southie here today, everybody would be screwed because what seems like the entirety of the Boston Fire and Police Department are here today, marching in a parade of mourning, blaring their sirens as they roll slowly down the barricaded roads, flanked by what seems like a hundred bystanders standing on the sidewalks, craning their necks to look on towards the scene and pay their respects to its fallen. My father just so happens to be one among them._

_ If nothing else my city is known for its dedication. _

_ The entire funeral begins in the form of a procession that looks to me, more like a parade. The whole thing is very bizarre to me considering the fact that before today, I had thought parades like this were strictly reserved for things like Memorial Day and the Fourth of July; you know, events that my parents always dragged me to in order to keep Rachel amused when she had been younger, not funerals._

_ I sit in the back of a limousine, which I guess is also a pretty strange concept for me. Today is full of firsts. The windows in the back cabin are tinted, graciously preventing these rows and rows of strangers that stand before us from seeing our faces, shriveled and disfigured with sorrow. For this much, at least, I am grateful._

_ My mother sits directly across from me, so close that our knees touch. She wears all black, topped off with a pair of sunglasses that are much too large for her delicate face. The only thing that I can think of every time I risk glancing up at her is all of those pictures plastered in my old history books of Jackie O, standing tall at her own husband's funeral wearing that weird beret and awkward, black veil over her face..._

_ Even from behind the glasses, I can tell that she is crying. Tears leak out from underneath the enormous frames and drip off of her prominent chin. Every couple of minutes, she will slip and accidentally release a gut-wrenching sob; the kind that originates from the very pit of your stomach, the kind that you try so desperately to muffle only to have it catch in your throat and echo out even louder._

_ Me, well lets just say that I am glad that the hearse is behind us and not in front. From the back, I cannot see it, which makes it that much easier for me not to believe what is inside of it. It makes it that much easier for me to believe that he is not really gone. _

_ Rachel sits directly next to me. I sit as close to her as our bodies will allow and hold tight onto her hand the entire time. Every couple of minutes, I will give her hand an extra firm squeeze, just to remind her that I am still here with her. That I will always be here with her._

_ The sound of bagpipes and drums swim inside of my head. They make my brain spin and the walls of the limousine appear to be closing in. I am feeling claustrophobic to the point that my chest physically begins to tighten when the car lurches and begins to roll and somehow, begins to open up again._

_ We drive at a crawling pace. I can probably walk to the church that my father's funeral mass will be presented in faster. The whole tone of these events, they're all slow paced and depressing. It fits my mood perfectly._

_ But while pushing forward rather than sitting at a stand still has come to me as a relief, it all quickly becomes too much for Rachel. She sniffles for a couple of seconds, trying desperately to hold it all in, but ultimately the tears win._

_ The only thing that I can do is hold onto her hand tighter. Now, instead of simply squeezing every couple of minutes, I latch on in one, continuous death-grip. I refuse to allow myself to cry. Not here. Not now. I have to be the strong one here. _

_ For Rachel._

* * *

"Rachel! Santana! Is anybody home?"

I am jolted awake by the sound of my mother's voice echoing through the house. With a groan, I roll over back onto my back, hissing in the pain that this action causes my wounded muscles. When had I even fallen asleep?

"San?"

I push myself up and into a seated position using my arms. When my bleary eyes finally clear, they find Rachel standing in the doorway, knocking tentatively against the wooden frame. She is wearing a pair of my old sweatpants and her hair is pulled up into a high, sloppy bun. It is still wet, so I use this to assume that I must haven't been sleeping for too long.

"Mom is home. She has dinner." She informs me.

"Alright." I smile gently although I still feel as though I am half asleep. "Tell her I'll be right there, okay?"

"Okay." Rachel nods and ducks out from my doorway. I stretch out against the mattress, taking my sweet time swinging my legs over the side of the bed, rubbing at my eyes with closed fists, trying to wash away the evidence that I had just been dreaming about the morning of my father's funeral before I went outside to face my mother.

I move slowly. By the time I round into the kitchen, Rachel is already seated at the dining room table, waiting patiently as my mother springs around the kitchen, bouncing between pulling paper dishes out of the cabinets and plastic take-out containers out of their bags. She still has that kick of energy inside of her step, the one that had brought me so much confusion earlier that morning.

I can only take this as a sign that the job interview that she'd had at Carmel High had gone well. I hope so. It was about time that we had some good news around here.

You wouldn't know it just by looking at her today but in a past life, my mother had been making a pretty decent name for herself in the world of Broadway.

On the day that she had met my father, she was still doing mostly minor productions – she would be cast as an understudy here, given a lead role in an off-Broadway performance there – living in a small, cramped apartment in Brooklyn that she shared with six other girls just so that she would be able to afford rent during her bid to get to the top.

Her big break came the day that she had been asked to perform at an annual event hosted by the NYFD; a softball tournament against the Boston Fire Department in The Bronx that ended with a huge, public festival and barbecue outside in the large sandlot directly across from Yankee Stadium.

That's where she met my dad. The way he used to tell it, she'd looked like an angel in a long, flowing white dress that cut off at the knees and her hair pulled back into an elegant bun. He was drunk in the beer garden, slurring his words as he attempted to express to her just how beautiful her voice sounded to him.

A couple of weeks later, she was throwing her Broadway dreams to the side and moving out of her Brooklyn apartment to make the four hour trek north to Boston.

There, she had played part to a couple of odd jobs and was designated to be the featured guest at a handful of vocal clinics for the Berkly School of Music but in Boston, she had never really managed to get her name around like she had done back in New York. Within the year, she had given up on that idea entirely. She married my father and a couple of months later, I was born, and then came Rachel's turn, permanently securing my mother's dreams of Broadway, transferring them into dreams of motherhood. She always told Rachel and I that she preferred it this way, that no Broadway stage could ever come close to being a mother. At the same time, I knew that the idea was always lingering in the back of her mind.

_What if?_

"Oh good Santana, can you please help your sister set the table?"

I don't even realize that I am just sitting inside of the doorway leading to the dining room, lingering on the scene in front of me until my mother finally spots me and immediately puts me to work.

"I'm sorry that I'm so late with dinner but they kept me at Carmel longer than I thought they would." She is scrambling about the kitchen, rambling as she darts back and forth between the kitchen and dining room trying to put food on the table for us, shoveling the take-out from their white, plastic containers into actual serving bowls in an effort to make the entire thing more more presentable, as if she were trying to fool Rachel and I into believing that she had been slaving in the kitchen for hours. I work diligently with Rachel as my partner, but we haven't quite gotten around to unpacking the dishes and silverware yet so all despite my mother's best efforts, all we are eating with is paper plates and Dixie cups.

"Okay." My mom breathes heavily with the finality of her movements and she places the last of the bowls down at the table, taking a seat in a manner that indicates for us to follow suite.

"So girls, how was your first day of school?"

She is the one to initiate conversation with us. It is the first time in weeks that she had asked us something so casual like how our day had gone simply for the sake of knowing. I would like to believe that this is an indication of her moving on, of trying to reinstate a sense of normal into our lives, but I am so busy thinking about how strange and awkward this entire conversation feels already that normal is the absolute last thing on my mind at the moment.

"It was fine."

Rachel intercepts the answer from me. Her voice is airy and distant. I can tell that the Slushee incident that had turned a pretty good day into a relatively crappy one is still on the forefront of her mind, however she never mentions it. I guess I didn't really expect her to.

"Santana is a cheerleader now."

I shoot Rachel a look. This is not the way that I had intended on my mother finding out that somewhere along the journey from Boston to Lima, her oldest daughter had somehow managed to flip her personality an entire one hundred and eighty degrees.

"A cheerleader?" As expected, she raises two very surprised eyebrows. I flush, mortified. Why am I so embarrassed by this?

"Yeah, and Rachel joined the glee club." I try to change the subject. I instantly know that my plan has worked when my mother's head shoots up from her dinner plate, seemingly intrigued by this news; more so than she had been about my joining the Cheerios, anyway.

"The New Directions?" She asks Rachel.

"That's the one." My sister nods her head. I watch as my mother's eyes settle. She crosses her arms over her chest with a satisfied smile on her face as though happy that at least one of her offspring has managed to inherit the talent of her reining musical throne.

"There's a chance that we may be competing against you come Sectionals, you know." She informs Rachel of this minute detail with an undertone in her voice as though asking Rachel whether or not she is prepared to lose to her mother in the heat of competition; a scenario very likely given Vocal Adrenaline's startling reputation. I am just beginning to wonder the same thing when something about my mother's comment leaves a flash of realization sparking through my attention.

"You got the job?"

This would certainly explain a lot. Suddenly, my mother's recent behavior is making a lot more sense. Here I was, sitting among the head glee director for Carmel High School, infamous for their ruthless, yet successful bid to receive top honors year after year. Even _I_ have heard of their reputation and I was trying to avoid glee, as well as any and all association with it at all costs.

But for all intents and purposes, I was now officially related to glee club royalty.

"I got the job." She confirms with a stiff nod of her head.

"Congratulations, mom." I offer because really, this _is_ good news. It is, at the very least, a sign that my mother is starting to move on, slowly begining that transition into becoming my mom again, fighting off that black cloud that has been dangling above her head ever since my father died... Maybe we were all going to be okay after all.

"Thank you, Santana." She expresses to me with a genuine gratitude. "And listen girls, about this job... Yes, the money is good and the benefits are fantastic, and with this plus everything that the fire department gave us after... after your father died, we will be okay, we will be comfortable; with this house, with your college funds... We are going to be okay." She repeats this sentiment over and over again. It is almost as though she is trying to convince herself just as much as she is us. She pauses, breathing heavily for a moment so that I know that there is a _but_ coming somewhere in the midst of her statement of good will and fortune. There is _always_ a but. "But the hours that they're going to be having me work for the time being, well they're going to be a bit... hectic." She chooses her words carefully but I still interpret them to mean that there is a strong chance that I will not be seeing a lot of my mother just so long as she is working this job.

"Hectic how?"

"Well, first and foremost the commute is a little bit much, plus they want me to put in nights to start out with, as well as a couple of weekends..." She attempts to work her way around actually saying that she is being expected to put in roughly fifteen to twenty hour work days, but I see the truth dancing inside of her eyes. "They take their glee club very seriously at Carmel, girls. It brings in a lot of revenue for their school and with competition in full swing, they're expecting me to be at my best. They're expecting a lot of hours. Now I know that things haven't exactly been easy on us lately. All of this, plus transitioning to the move... I need to ask you guys if you are comfortable with me taking this job."

"I think its good mom." I encourage her, because although I can feel Rachel staring a hole through me, expressing the idea that she is not so certain about this as I am, I know that it is good for my mother to take this job. It is good for her to have something to distract her, something to encourage her to drag herself out of bed each and every morning.

Besides, it is nice to see her acting like this for a change – like a mother.

"Yeah, mom." Rachel echoes my sentiments although her voice is not quite as confident as mine. "Besides, I want to be able to whoop you guys' butts at Regionals."

Her face smooths over and relaxes. She wears a soft smile that immediately makes her look ten years younger; the kind of smile that a person doesn't have to try to wear. I soak it all in, try to remember every line, every contour of it just in case I ever lose it again.

"Now just because I'm your mother, don't you think that I'm going to be taking it easy on you." She warns. Her tone is light; she's joking, but she's serious. My mother has always been very competitive. We're talking about the woman that wouldn't even let her daughters win at a game of Checkers when we were five. "Now eat up." She waves us off as if to say _enough of all of this serious chatter_ with a tone of finality to her voice. "You girls must be starving."

All three of us are just collectively lifting our forks to take the first bite when somewhere from behind us, a cell phone blares like a gunshot and breaks through the residual silence.

My mother shoots up inside of her seat like somebody had just lit a fire beneath her chair.

"Hello?"

She answers it on the second ring. Darting from the kitchen, she rounds quickly into the living room, clearly in a bid for some privacy. I look towards Rachel. She meets me halfway; we are already thinking the same thing. What the hell could have just caused my mother to dart out of the beginnings of a very nice family dinner like a bat out of hell.

I can't see my own face but I am willing to guess it looks very similar to Rachel's right about now.

"Oh hi, _Andrew_."

Her voice is muffled with distance, but still, her words and her tone are distinctly clear. My mother has a beautiful voice, she always had. She hadn't been considered to be the future of the Broadway stage at one point in time for no reason. When she was singing, everybody knew it. When she says the name _Andrew_, I am immediately reminded of Rachel earlier that morning, when she was singing and dancing, making fun of me for thinking that I had a crush on Puck.

Except this was not my fourteen year old little sister trying to poke fun at me for a high school crush that didn't even exist. This was my mother. More importantly, this was my mother talking to a guy.

I don't know who this Andrew guy is, or what his story may be but I don't like him already.

I study my sister's expression. Rachel's brows are furrowed together tight in the center of her forehead. Her concern is obvious, making it clear to me that her initial thoughts and concerns are much the same as my own.

Me a cheerleader, Rachel being slushied, my mom not only smiling and laughing with her children, but leaving dinner to chat on the phone with a boy... Today was like something out of the Twilight Zone and if it hadn't been weird before, it was definitely weird now.

And I am not sure if I like it this way.

* * *

The breakfast table the next morning poses a remarkably different air to it than dinner had last night.

I stand in the kitchen, staring into the dull reflection of myself that bounces off of the microwave, multi-tasking as I wait for my oatmeal to finish cooking while simultaneously trying to ensure that my hair was perfect. Who knew that so much work had to be done for something as simple as a ponytail.

"You look beautiful, San." My mother rounds into the kitchen, catching me by surprise. I jump but she doesn't seem to notice. She is too busy plucking toast from the toaster, turning in pirouettes as she passes the food along to Rachel, sitting patiently at the dining room table before rounding back into the kitchen in order to feed herself. "Besides, you're much too young to be wasting yourself with worry about things like that."

I stare at her, watching as her eyes glisten. When she turns to face me, this time I catch the light perfectly inside of her eyes, the truth reflected behind the mask of her vagueness -

_Don't waste these years like I did._

I roll my eyes at her maternal advice but catch myself in the middle of the action. I am disgusted with myself. Here I was, already becoming somebody that I didn't even recognize anymore. This morning, every time I walked past a mirror, every time I caught an image of myself I had to do a double-take just to ensure that I wasn't seeing things, just to make sure that this new Santana Corcoran was actually real.

"How do I look?" My mom twirls in a circle, showing off her brand new, purple dress, going against everything that she had just said to me about vanity as she requests my opinion on her appearance.

"You look beautiful, mom."

I say it because she really does look beautiful. My mother has always been the type of person that didn't have to try in order to look nice. Her beauty was a natural one, and although it had been chipped away at through years and years of weathering and worry, that did not mean that it was not still there, hidden beneath the surface.

"Thank you, Santana." She is strangely perky and generous. I don't think I can recall a time in my life where me and my mother have ever spoken like... well, _this_ before; so free, so casually. That had just never been our relationship.

What the hell was going on around here?

And just when I think that things cannot get any stranger than they already are, she walks closer towards me, pulls me into a quick, one-armed hug and plants a kiss on the top of my head.

"Don't wait up for me for dinner tonight." She informs Rachel and I. "Vocal Adrenaline has Sectionals coming up this weekend. I'm leaving for Cleveland on Friday night and won't be back until Sunday so this week is going to be a busy one. There's money on the counter for dinner. I'll see you guys tomorrow morning, okay?"

She walks from the kitchen before either Rachel and I even have time to respond. The both of us simply stay silent, listening as her high heels crack across the wooden floors, making a path like the beat of a drum all the way to the front door which opens and closes in one sweeping blow, leaving Rachel and I unable to do much other than stare, sheer confusion plastered on the both of our faces. We are both thinking the exact same thing -

Who the hell is this woman and what has she done with our mother?

* * *

_It has been a week and my mother still won't even get out of her bed._

_The day of my father's funeral, she had been up at dawn. She'd spent hours perfecting her hair, plastering on her make up; hell, she had spent over $200 on a brand new outfit that now lay puddled in the center of her bedroom floor where it has laid ever since that day._

_ She showed up for my father's funeral so early, she'd arrived even before my father did. _

_ I am more than positive that she has not so much as gotten out of her bed since the day that we buried him. She doesn't sleep. She doesn't eat. The only thing that she does seem to do anymore is cry._

_ "Mom!"_

_ Today, I have had enough of this nonsense. Actually, I have had enough of it for a couple of days now, but today I finally snapped after I'd opened the fridge to make Rachel and I breakfast only to find nothing left inside of it but three eggs, some mustard, and a gallon of milk that smelled like a dead fish and came out in chunks when I'd gone to pour it down the sink. _

_ "Mom, you've got to get up!" I demand this of her and do not present her with an option to do anything otherwise. But she barely so much as blinks in response to my presence, let alone make a move to pull herself out of bed._

_ "What do you need, Santana?"_

_ For somebody who once built an entire career centered around her voice, it sure does sound dead._

_ "You need to get out of bed, mom!" I tell her. "There's no food in the house, Rachel and I are starving. You need to go grocery shopping, you need to take us back to school... Jesus Christ, mom rent is due in a week!" I emphasize the phrase 'in a week' because I am foolish enough to think that the rush will spark a bit of haste into her movements. I don't even know why I act so surprised when all she does is blink up at me and stare. "We need to figure out what we're going to do now." _

_ "I'll get to it, Santana." This is all she mutters to me – an empty promise – and with that, she rolls right back over against her mattress. _

_ She turns her back on me._

* * *

It took a couple of days of trying, but I did manage to pull my mom out of that bed. It took _another_ couple of days after that but eventually, I had gotten her to get dressed, to take a shower, to brush her hair; all things that had once come so naturally suddenly taking tremendous effort.

In the exact opposite fashion of my mom, I thrived on all of the nervous energy that my father's death had thrown onto my shoulders. In my desperate efforts to forget everything that was happening in my life, I transferred my grief into productivity; I bought the groceries for Rachel and I with what little money I had. I made sure that Rachel was fed, that she got up every morning to go to school. I made sure that she did not get swallowed into that ugly pit of depression as my mother had... Hell, I was kind of the reason that we had ended up moving to Lima at all.

Like most things like this tend to do, it all started with a phone call from an old friend.

His name was Dustin Goolsby; a colleague of my mother back when she was still living in New York. Both had strived for Broadway, both had come just far from touching it. A couple of months after my mom and dad got married, and my mother had left New York for Boston, he himself left New York for a small town in northwestern Ohio - the town that he'd grown up in - in order to help cope with the fact that he would never make it on Broadway by teaching music classes at Carmel High School instead. I haven't seen him since I was a kid, but he was the type of friend that still sent cards on important holidays and called every now and than to check up on the state of the family.

He was calling because he had heard a week too late that my father had been killed in a tragic accident. I was the one who answered the phone.

He asked me how my mom was holding up and I lied for her. I told him that she was doing fine. That she was grieving, but at the same time, coping. I couldn't tell whether he believed me or not because he promptly moved on to business. He told me that knew that this was probably the last thing that my mother wanted to think about right now, but with her being a stay-at-home mom with no income and my father being, well, dead, he thought that she might be interested in a job opening at the high school that he worked at. Their old glee club director was getting ready to retire and they needed a new one. The money was fantastic and with his pull as head of the high school's music department, Dustin guaranteed that he could secure this job for her. The only catch – moving to Ohio. I was quick to volunteer my mother. I saw it as an opportunity for her, for us all.

I guess that the rest of the story kind of tells itself.

"Santana!"

I hadn't even noticed that Rachel has been trying to get my attention for the last couple of minutes until she starts to yell at me.

"Hmm?" I ask, distracted as I tilt my head up to look at her.

"I said, what do you think is going on with mom?" I am surprised by her question. Rachel has never been a very direct person when it comes to talking about things that make her uncomfortable. As it is, she is still not saying out loud, everything that she wants to ask.

I interpret her question as meaning – _What do you think about this mysterious man that mom was talking on the phone with like a giddy middle school girl last night?_

"What, with her new boyfriend?"

Rachel blanches. "Do you really think...?"

"Let her be, Rach." I wave off my sister's concern casually, trying to pretend like the entire situation doesn't bother me when the reality of it is, it does. "We're in a new town trying to get this new start... She's meeting new people, Rach, trying new things. We can't just keep locking ourselves inside of the house mourning for the rest of our lives."

"But... but..." Rachel stutters. She is looking for anything to defend the fact that there is absolutely nothing about this situation that she is comfortable with. "It's barely been two months, San!" She finally blurts.

"She's _happy_, Rachel." I tell her because I am trying to convince myself of this fact as much as I am her. "She's coping, moving on... At least it's not like before."

From directly outside of our front door, a horn blares solidifying the fact that this conversation will end here. Thank God.

"Come on." I stand to my feet, draping my book bag over my left shoulder and beckoning for Rachel to follow me. "Just forget about it, Rachel. Don't spend the entire day worrying about it. Just let mom do what she needs to do. Now let's go, you know how impatient Puck can be."

"Fine." She says, but based on her tone alone I know that this is not something that she will simply be able to drop from her thoughts all together.

Silently, I think the same exact thing.

* * *

I feel generally shitty this entire morning.

By the time Puck finally got us to school, all three of us had already been so late that we barely had time to bid each other farewell before we were headed in our separate directions; Noah to football practice, Rachel to the choir room, and me to the female locker room in order to prepare to be slayed by Sue Sylvester and the rest of her Cheerios.

It is to my utmost horror that I find, upon walking into the locker room, that the only person inside of it is Quinn Fabray.

I freeze suddenly. I had completely forgotten that this would be the first time I would have to face her since she'd called me out for being a phony and than promptly threw a Slushee in my little sister's face.

What does it say that I am afraid of a girl the same age as my baby sister?

"Where is everybody?" I clear my throat to indicate my presence. Quinn's head darts up from inside of her locker as though I had just startled her out of a trance.

When she looks up at me, trying to identify who it was that had just spoken to her, subsequently breaking the peace of silence, her guard is down entirely. For the first time since I had met her, Quinn Fabray is defenseless and for that split second, she actually looks like a normal human being, capable of normal, human emotions.

But that is all that it is – a split second – before she recognizes me and her face sets back into stone all over again.

"Coach Sylvester cancelled practice." Quinn tells me, busying herself inside of her locker once more. "She ran out of her diet supplements. Apparently what she takes, she can only buy on the black market in Detroit so she took emergency leave this morning. I sent out a text." She pauses. Lifting her head out of her locker once more, her eyes narrow inwards, fixing themselves directly on me. "I guess you didn't get the word."

"Yeah." I tense instinctively. Historically, I am not a very confrontational person to begin with, and there is something about Quinn Fabray that brings out a whole other side to me. Something I have yet to distinguish is a good thing or a bad thing quite yet. "Yeah, I guess not."

"I guess I'll just have to be more careful next time."

She stands straight upright and raises her chin high into the air, rolling her shoulders back so that she stands so stiff and rigid that I am not entirely sure how her back is not breaking underneath the immense pressure.

She pulls her bag from her locker, draping it over her shoulder with the clear intention on leaving the locker room without speaking so much as another word to me. When she passes me, our shoulders bump; not too hard, but hard enough so that I stumble backwards a step or two. The action is intentional.

I stand back upright, regaining my footing. _Let it go._ I beg myself, desperate to ignore my boiling blood and my heart as it begins to thump harder and harder inside fo my chest. My cheeks are flushed dark red. I can feel the heat burning against my face.

She is getting to me.

After everything that I had ever been through; the pain of a tormented childhood, the teasing, the bullying, the abuse at the hands of past classmates; after all of that, for some reason Quinn Fabray – a girl that I had barely known for twenty four hours now – is the one that is getting underneath my skin to the point that I am starting to lose control.

"Why did you throw a Slushee on my sister yesterday?"

I don't turn to look at her, but I can hear her footsteps coming to an abrupt halt in her surprise that I had just solidified my stance on refusing to be yet another weak high school girl that Quinn can just stomp all over with no consequence.

"I don't know what you're talking about."

At her reply, I turn towards her. She is facing me once again. Both of our shoulders our squared-up. I glare into her eyes; deep and blue. It is like staring into a tub of ice. I shudder, but try to make the motion unnoticeable.

"Cut the bullshit, Quinn!"

Her lying to me is only getting me more heated. I am sick and tired of everybody always lying to me. My mother had lied to me when she told me she was going to get herself out of that bed, she was going to take care of herself and us. Rachel had lied to me when she told me that she was totally fine with spending the rest of her days a glee club loser when I know it kills her just as much as it had killed me. My dad had lied to me, telling me – after his fire pager had begun to blare late that night – that I should go back to bed. That he would see me in the morning.

Quinn shifts on her feet. She crosses her arms, studying me carefully. The look on her face is smug and content, ready and appreciative of the challenge that I had presented to her by standing up for myself like that. She is surprised that I had it in me, and honestly, I am too but there is a fire raging inside of my chest; my lungs are heaving and I am choosing to channel all of that into anger because I will be damned if I let any of that weak crap show in front of her.

"I get that you have an issue with me, but whatever that issue is, you leave Rachel out of it."

"Contraire to popular belief, the world does not revolve around you, Santana Corcoran." She takes a couple of challenging steps towards me. I counter her motions. For every step forward she takes, I take one backwards because although I _have_ somehow managed to reach down inside of myself and pull some courage out, I still perceive Quinn as a threat. I am still intimidated as to what she is capable of doing to me. "I Slusheed your sister because she is a loser. A big, fat, glee club loser. I throw Slushees on all losers, not just losers who just so happen to be related to you. That is my responsibility as captain of the Cheerios. Me and you, we don't have any problems. Yet."

"If you keep on throwing Slushees in my sister's face, we're going to have serious problems!" I raise my voice when I deliver this threat because I have no intentions on it being empty. I hadn't even realized that I have been inching progressively closer to her throughout all of this until we are face-to-face. She glares straight through me and I glare right back. Our spines are rigid, bodies poised and ready to strike at a moment's notice, if that's what this comes down to.

There are several, tense moments of complete silence. No words, just the two of us sizing each other up. I am waiting on her to make the first move because to be honest, if she were to reach up and hit me right now I am not entirely sure what I would do.

It's a theory that I really don't want to test right now either.

To my utmost relief, if not complete surprise, within seconds that feel to me as though they might as well have been hours, Quinn relaxes her muscles, she sinks back against her heels and she begins to laugh.

"Who knew that you had a pair of balls hiding underneath that Cheerios skirt, Corcoran." I raise an eyebrow, not entirely sure how to interpret this. "I gotta say, it's a lot more than I thought of you."

"You know Quinn, you don't have to be threatened by me." I tell her this flat outright. As long as we are finally being honest with each other, right? "I'm not looking to take your spot as queen of McKinley or whatever it is that you think I'm trying to do here. I'm just trying to make a couple of friends to get me through these last couple months of high school. That's it."

She laughs at me again and I furrow my eyebrows together. Why the hell does she keep laughing at me?

But this time, the motion is heavy. It is full of something else. Sarcasm? No, that wasn't it. Disbelief? Maybe. All I knew for sure is that there is something hidden beneath the surface of Quinn Fabray's perfect persona, and I may not be entirely sure what it is right now, but I damn well plan on finding out.

"We'll see about that."

With that, she turns, throwing an extra flip into the motions of her tight ponytail, her Cheerios skirt swaying behind her with every exaggerated step that she takes towards the locker room exit.

"Hey, Quinn." I call her back just as she reaches out and latches onto the door handle. She pauses and turns back towards me. I work my jaw carefully back and forth, testing what I intend to ask her briefly in my mind, debating whether or not it is a good idea to actually say it before I settle on speaking up rather than backing down before her. "Why is it so important to you? Being perfect all the time, I mean."

She doesn't falter. Instead, she delivers a soft smile, but it is a gesture that never quite reaches her eyes. They are sad, empty. I can't help but to think of that image of my mother, laying prone inside of her bed for a week and a half and I shudder.

"Because I know what it's like to not be good enough."

And with that she turns, gliding from the room with a grace and poise that I can only dream of.

The door swings shut slowly, the creaky hinges drowning out the sound of the blonde's footsteps as they grow further and further away, leaving me alone, standing tall in my confusion as to what the hell Quinn had meant by that, leaving me wondering if maybe, just maybe me and Quinn Fabray had a lot more in common than I initially thought.

* * *

"Hey, what are you doing here so early? Did you not get the call about Cheerios being cancelled?"

Brittany finds me ducking out of the locker room and into the hallway the second that I feel comfortable enough to make my appearance public. After that interaction with Quinn, I had been overwhelmed with the sudden desire to take a moment, to breathe, to calm myself down from that adrenaline-fueled rush that I had been left with. I needed to compose myself. I needed to look normal. I needed to wipe away any evidence of suspicion from my features.

"Uh... no." I stumble slightly because Brittany being the first person to find me when I am still trapped inside of a vulnerable state of mind is probably the worst thing that could possibly happen to me right now. "I guess that Quinn hasn't gotten around to putting me on the roster yet."

"Oh well," She shrugs because my made-up excuse is believable and it makes it look like this was a situation in which no one is to blame – no harm, no foul. Just as I had intended, she moves on, away from the entire situation with an ease that I am grateful for because I really did not want to get into what had happened between Quinn and I earlier that morning.

Not now, not ever.

"Hey, I heard you got a ride from Puck this morning."

"I got a ride from Puck yesterday morning too." I point out the obvious. She is back on that whole make believe scenario she'd created inside of her own head of Puck and I being a match made in heaven, simply based off of the fact that he was willing to drive three houses down the road every morning to take Rachel and I to school. "He's my neighbor."

"That makes it even more perfect, can't you see? Ugh, I can't wait until the two of you get together." Brittany is gushing. I try to mask her enthusiasm, but I have a feeling that my fake smile looks more like a grimace than anything else. I guess I just don't have the energy inside of me to fake it this morning.

"Puck is a great boyfriend, actually." She rambles. "We used to be together before I got with Sam. He tries to act like such a tough when he's in school and around his friends and stuff, but really that's just him trying to be all alpha male. By himself, he's nothing more than a big teddy bear."

"You and Puck dated?" My head snaps up, suddenly intrigued.

"Mhm."

"Why'd you break up?" I feel suddenly as though I am asking way too many questions. Being _nosy_, as my mother liked to call it whenever I pestered her. But in this situation, I just couldn't help myself.

Brittany only shrugs. She doesn't seem to mind all of the questions. "I guess that he just wasn't the one."

"So what about Sam? Is he the one?"

Okay, now I am _definitely_ being nosy.

Brittany pauses, carefully considering my question. The fact that she even has to think about the answer makes me giddy with hope, as terrible as that may sound. But hey, I have since learned to make the best out of _any_ great situation. And this was definitely one of those.

"I don't know." She finally settles on, and this is the best answer to my question that I could have possibly asked for.

We round outside of the main doors, into the cul-de-sac leading towards the Senior parking lot. It is a beautiful fall morning. We embrace our last couple of minutes of freedom before the bell rings and traps us all back inside.

"So Santana, what are your plans for your first weekend here in Lima?"

I freeze. I had forgotten all about the prospect of the weekend, too busy trying to get my foot in the door here at William McKinley to even consider it. My spine rushes with the feeling as though ice water were suddenly running through it. Weekends amongst the popular crowd, I know from stories and not experience, were generally designated for large parties and binge drinking until it came time for school again on Monday, activities that I – no surprise here – have never been a part of.

And if I wasn't exposed a fraud at my Cheerios try out yesterday, I knew my luck would have to run out the moment I stepped into a party looking like a deer in the headlights.

"Uh... I don't know." I answer. Historically speaking, I usually spent my Friday and Saturday nights at home either embracing the fact that I had free-reign to sit inside of my bedroom for forty eight hours without anybody bothering me or else just hanging out with my sister, roaming around the streets of Boston, watching movies, or else just hanging out. I had the slightest feeling however, that these actions would not fly well among my new group of friends. I choose not to mention it. "Isn't there a football game on Friday night?"

"Not just any football game." Brittany informs me. Her voice is already giddy with anticipation. "It's the home opener, and we are going to kick the crap out of Elida, just like we do every year. What I meant was, what are you doing _after_ the football game?"

"After?" I choke on the question like an idiot.

"You're coming to the after party." It is not a question but a statement. I guess I am going to a party on Friday night.

"Uh... yeah, sure. I'll be there." I have absolutely no idea what the hell I am getting myself into. "Where is it?"

"Do you really want to fit in with our crowd, Santana?"

Quinn Fabray has an uncanny ability of popping up into conversation at the most inopportune of times. I am starting to think that she does this on purpose.

"What?" I spin on my heels, turning to face her because I am genuinely confused about what exactly she is trying to say. Of course, knowing Quinn, I perceive it as a threat, just in case.

"I asked if you _really_ want to fit in with the Cheerios."

A threat. Definitely a threat.

"Of course I do." I answer despite myself.

"Well we heard through the grapevine that your mother is going to be away in Cleveland all weekend long." I raise an eyebrow. I am so focused on how the hell she had managed to find out this information when I myself have only found out a couple of hours ago now, that I am not immediately able to figure out exactly what it is that she is trying to imply.

I work her statement out inside of my head for a couple of moments. The realization hits me like a ton of bricks. My eyes widen, my face brightening with the sudden air of dawning. I watch as Quinn's lips curl upwards, satisfied as my heart sinks. The biggest party of the school year to date and Quinn wanted to use me – or more accurately, my house – to host it.

"Um..."

I stutter in my search for something to respond with. I refuse to commit right away because the idea of hosting a rager inside of the house that I just moved into two days ago did not seem like the best idea right now. Plus, if I were to get caught, which I know I probably would, my mother would kill me and she was still busy grieving my father's death. She didn't need a murder charge resting on her shoulders as well.

"You see, I told you that she wouldn't do it, Britt."

Quinn turns to Brittany, who's face shrouds with disappointment as she looks up towards me with puppy dog eyes. I scramble. I was losing my opportunity to shine, to impress her, and I was losing it fast.

_Don't do it, Santana_. I can hear my subconscious screaming at me as my heart begins to pound inside of my chest and the sweat starts to bead around the edges of my ridiculously tight hair line. _Don't walk into this trap._

But my subconscious was not the one that was going to have to face these people every single day for the next year. My subconscious was not the one that was going to have to consider going back to the years of torment, negating all of these positive changes that I had seen developing before my very eyes. My subconscious was not the one that was going to have to throw away all of these friends after I was finally just making them. No, that was me and me alone. _I_, Santana Corcoran had the opportunity to host the biggest party of the school year.

I felt as though I were holding my fate inside of the palm of my hands.

"Wait." I finally say, stopping Quinn and Brittany in their bickering as they debate who could possibly host the party now that I was backing down. They both silence and turn towards me, devious grins plastered on their faces.

They had caught me. Hook, line and sinker.

"I'll do it."


	5. Hands in the Sky

**Hey everyone. Sorry this is a bit late, I've been pretty busy these last couple of days getting ready to head to California for a ten day training operation and for anybody that has ever been to the Majove Desert, you know there isn't much out there but a whole lot of nothing. Hope to see you all in the next couple of days, sorry again for the wait. I appreciate you all!**

* * *

**Chapter 5**** –** Hands in the Sky

"Girls, can you give me a hand in here?"

I groan heavily. My eyes are still weighted-down, heavy with sleep as I am awakened by an immediate request to be put to work.

"Santana, what are you doing still in bed?" My mother. Her voice rings straight through me as she appears inside of my doorway. My eyes are bleary, but I can still see the expression of disapproval inside of her face. "Come on, you have to be at school in a half hour and I can use a hand over here!"

I respond with a series of elongated grumbles that not even I can translate. "Five more minutes." It takes a little while, but I finally manage to string together actual words, all of which are muffled by my face still being half-buried inside of my pillow.

"Now, Santana!"

Her tone is hardened to allow me to know that she means business, eliciting a response that only a mother can manage, but the sound of her footsteps making their way back down the hall allows me to foolishly think that maybe, if I am really quiet, I can capitalize on a couple extra, blissful minutes of sleep.

"Wake up, San!"

My eyes shoot open. So much for that theory, I guess.

The shrillness of the voice in combination with its volume makes it so that it echoes straight through my ears and makes my heart pound in an elaborate cadence against my rib cage. I jump so violently that I nearly fall out of my bed.

Well, I guess I am awake now.

"What the hell, Rachel?" I grumble, grabbing a fistful of my pillow so that I can fling it at her although she dodges my projectile with ease.

Needless to say, I am not a morning person.

I turn to glare at Rachel. If looks could kill. I am certain that I look terrifying at the moment. Through the corners of my eyes, I can make out stray strands of frizzled, dark hair. The bags underneath my eyes are so deep that I am almost drowning inside of them. I _feel_ like a dishevled mess, but apparently it is not enough because the only thing that Rachel is doing is laughing at me.

I roll my eyes. Sometimes I really do wish that I had remained an only child.

"Come on, lazy." She beckons me out of the comforts of my bed. "Noah is gonna be here soon and mom still needs help packing her bags into her car."

_Her bags_... This catches my attention. I had almost forgotten that today was Friday. That meant that it was only a matter of hours before my mother would be headed to Cleveland for her glee club's Sectionals competition. More importantly, it meant that it was only a matter of hours that I had left to live. This was because after this party went sour as I was certain it was going to – after my house went up into flames or I ended up in jail or another of the plethora of ridiculous scenarios that could happen tonight – my mother was going to come home. And she was going to kill me.

I have spent a lot of my time this week trying to concoct some of the best case scenarios regarding the ending of this party that I was hosting tonight... So far, the best thing that I could bring myself to look forward to was to spend the rest of my life in prison.

Okay, so maybe I was over exaggerating. Maybe things actually _will_ go smoothly for a change. Maybe I really did have absolutely nothing to worry about. Maybe the entire town won't show up. Maybe things won't all go to hell. Maybe everything will be perfectly okay in the end.

_Yeah right, Santana_. I think to myself. _Fat chance_.

This whole thing is not making me particularly eager to crawl out of bed. Maybe I should get my mother to call me out sick from school today. Then I won't have to go to this football game or host this party at all... Of course, knowing Sue Sylvester that would probably mean my spot on the Cheerios line up which would undoubtedly cost me my popularity which would put me right back to square one – a _loser_.

I quickly reason, as I had been all week, that the latter would be a much less forgiving fate to land on so I roll out of my bed and make a quick routine of washing my face and smothering it with make up before I wiggle into my freshly dry-cleaned Cheerios uniform.

I multi-task expertly, walking down the hallway towards the living room while simultaneously throwing my hair into that traditional high, tight pony tail. It has barely been a week since I have been on the Cheerios and already, I am priding myself on the idea that I am actually getting pretty good at this. I am ready for school in five minutes flat, just in time to watch Rachel return from dragging the last of my mother's suitcases into her Range Rover.

"Oh, how nice of you to show up."

Her voice drips with sarcasm. I guess I must be rubbing off my derisive tendencies on her. I respond by smiling brightly, taunting her like only big sisters can do. Rachel immediately reciprocates by sticking her tongue out at me.

"Rachel, don't make faces at your sister." My mother catches only Rachel in the act of our silent bickering. I smirk, satisfied to get off scott-free for a change. "Alright, I think that I am all set here..." She switches gears, talking mostly to herself as she runs through her mental checklist of all of the proper preparations and planning that she has organized in order to spend the next two days apart from Rachel and I. "I will see you girls on Sunday, okay? I'll have my cell on me at all times so call me if you need anything. I left money on the counter for you for food, but I picked up a couple of things at the grocery store as well so you should be fine... Remember if you need anything quick, you can always call up Dustin, he is only an hour away. All of the emergency numbers are on the fridge-"

"Mom." I cut her off after allowing her to ramble for a few seconds more than I usually would just because it is so nice to hear her concerned about us for a change, rather than it being the other way around as it has been for weeks now. "We'll be fine."

"Of course you will." She states with a shake of her head and wave of her hand as though trying to convince herself that she is being silly, worrying like any decent mother would. "Now you two have fun this weekend." She bids us her farewells, wrapping me into a quick, one-armed hug before going over to do the same for Rachel. "You can invite a couple of friends over if you want." She multi-tasks, talking and moving towards the front door, bag in hand. Swinging the door open, she is just about to walk through and disappear behind it when she pauses, reconsidering. "Remember though, no parties."

It is as though she is reading my mind. My face blanches and I swallow heavily, my mouth suddenly so dry that I can't even elicit a response. Luckily, Rachel inadvertently picks up my slack, laughing so hard that she is practically doubled over; hard enough that it distracts from the obvious guilt written clear across my face.

"Yeah, right. I think you'll be safe with that one, right San?"

Rachel looks to me to reinforce the idea, but all I can manage is a slight, trembling laugh so high pitched it roughly resembles the tone of a dog whistle. Thank God my mother is already half way out the door because I know for a fact, had she not been so distracted between her new job and upcoming travel arrangements, I would have already been grounded by now.

"Okay then, bye girls! I love you!"

Her final goodbyes are drowned out by the door closing behind her. Rachel is unphased. She turns immediately back towards the breakfast in front of her, eating nonchalant in her blissful naivety towards the fact that a couple of hours from now this peace that she has since consumed herself with was going to be shattered.

"Satana?" She calls for my attention only after a couple additional moments in which I remained glued where I stood, standing stock still in the middle of the hallway, staring at the space that my mother had just vacated from. "Are you okay?"

Her voice is slick with concern. Immediately, I am wracked with guilt. I cannot keep this secret from her any longer. I cannot have her find out about this party only by coming home tonight and walking in on a hundred drunk teenagers. It wasn't fair. Nothing that I was doing to her was fair.

"The home opener party is here tonight."

I cut to the chase, being blunt without particularly meaning for it to have gone that way. But I guess in retrospect, being forthcoming was just about the best thing that I had to offer to Rachel, rather than skirting around the details and allowing my very imaginative, notoriously anxious sister to work herself into a frenzy coming up with worst case scenarios inside of her head. I watch her reaction carefully, studying her expression as her eyes widen and her face pales.

"W-what?" She manages under the false assumption that should she ask me to repeat myself, I may actually say something _other_ than the disheartening news I had just told her. I plaster an apologetic look across my face.

"The party." I repeat, and her face falls alongside that final hope that I had been playing some kind of sick practical joke on her. "After the football game tonight. I told some of the Cheerios that I could have it here."

I specifically avoid mentioning that I in fact only told _one_ Cheerio, Quinn Fabray that I could have the party here tonight because I feel like a hypocrite in having done so, like it only confirms that I have fallen to their level, becoming superficial and weak in the name of my own reputation.

"You're not serious." Her face sinks. "No really, this is like, your idea of an early April Fools or something, right?"

"I'm serious." I sigh. "Quinn Fabray has already kind of invited half of the town over."

"Quinn Fabray?"

Her tone changes directly alongside her expression. I watch as her eyes darken and my heart skips a beat when I immediately recognize the look on her face. I know it well, I wore it to perfection every time I'd confronted my mother in the weeks following my father's death – _Betrayal_. "You do realize that she threw a slushee on me yesterday, right?"

"Look, I already talked to Quinn about that, okay Rach. It's not gonna happen again, I promise."

Not even I believe the words that are coming out of my mouth, which is why I am not entirely surprised when the only thing that Rachel does in her response is cross her arms across her chest and narrow her eyes inwards towards me in an expression of pure disbelief.

"This is a bad idea, Santana." She is deflating more and more with each passing second as she tries harder and harder to come up with a best-case scenario only to come up empty each time.

"It's going to be fine Rachel. It's just a party." I tell her, but I am spewing nothing but uncertainties. Even I am light years away from being confident in this idea.

"Are you sure about that?"

_No._

"Yes."

She sighs heavily, an inhale so deep that it raises her at least two additional inches. Her eyes narrow directly into mine like she is trying desperately to read my thoughts. She gets that from our mother. I put the most neutral look on my face that I can manage, but it never works with my mom, I can almost guarantee that it doesn't work for Rachel either.

"I'm taking the bus to school today." She finally says after several tense seconds of an isolated silence. "I have some stuff I need to work on for glee club before practice today. I have to go to school early."

"Rachel!"

I call her back here, demand that she stops and talks to me logically about this before storming out of the house in a rage. But her back is already turned to me. I shrink visibly. There are a lot of things in my life that I can tolerate, but Rachel being mad at me is _not_ one of them.

"Rachel!" I call to her again after she ignores my first request to stop and listen to me, but by the time the final syllable is out of my mouth, the front door has already been slammed shut, right in my face.

* * *

By nightfall, I am a mess.

Sauntering out onto the football field, I take my respective position amidst the Cheerios line up directly to Quinn's right, and Brittany's left. The crowd is already starting to filter into the bleachers, but the title of cheerleader is not resonating remarkably well with me right now. In fact, I am feeling the exact opposite of cheery. Instead I'm starting to feel pretty damn foolish right now standing here in front of all of these people in a mini-skirt waving pom-poms in their faces with a fake smile plastered across my face.

"Are you nervous at all?"

I feel a small nudge against my left shoulder and snap my head quickly over towards Brittany where she is watching me carefully for any signs of anxiety. Her smile and show face do not falter once and I find myself quickly envious.

"Who me?" I try to play it off as though there were a possibility that she were talking to anybody _but_ me.

The fact of the matter is, feel as though I am ready to break at any given second. I have never felt so nervous in my entire life. It is my cheerleading debut, combined with my worries constantly circulating regarding this party, _plus_ the fact that Rachel still hasn't spoken a word to me since this morning all accumulating into one, giant cluster of apprehension. My heart is racing. My blood pressure is probably sky-rocketing through the roof, climbing higher and higher with each passing second. I feel like I am ready to stroke out at a moment's notice.

I plaster a fake smile on my face and pray to God that Brittany cannot see through it.

"It's okay if you are, you know." Shit, she knows. _Calm down, Santana_ – I try to reason with myself – _At least she is supportive, not judgmental like Quinn would be, or Coach Sylvester who would probably kick you off the Cheerios right here right now for displaying so much as a tic of timid energy._

"Are you sure about that?"

My question is legitimate. As I say it, I eye Quinn carefully through the corner of my eye, watching her as she bounces up and down along the track, doing crowd-pleasing front flips and hand springs and cartwheels until even _I_ was starting to get dizzy. But the audience roars with approval, and in Quinn's mind, that is all that matters.

"Of course it is." Brittany laughs, but I take her assurance with a grain of salt. "Your first time up here in front of this crowd? Hell, the first night that I came out here to cheer for the Titans, I was so nervous that I threw up egg salad all over the banner we made for the football team to run through when they came onto the field. We had to use the sign for the bowling team that night. It's scary; the whole town watching you, judging you, making sure you don't screw up, while meanwhile Coach Sylvester is up there analyzing your every last move, ready to kick you out at a moment's notice if you don't -"

"Okay, okay!"

I cut her off in her ramblings, because for some reason, her vocalizing my every fear about what could possibly go wrong tonight is not something that I need to hear right now.

"But you shouldn't worry about it, S." She offers me a friendly slap on the back for support, but I can only bring myself to grimace and even that, I perform with difficulty. The damage has already been done. "That was back when our football team sucked so bad that the only reason people even showed up to these games was to watch us. Coach Sylvester had to alter our skirts that year to make them a whole two inches shorter just so people would keep coming back. Don't worry about the crowd. Just think of all of the people that are here tonight to cheer you on."

_Oh yeah, like who?_

I make the snide comment inside of my own head, because after everything that I had been through with Quinn this week, on top of fighting with Rachel over something that she was totally right about, in addition to the fact that all of my friends were either here with me on this track, or else too busy engrossing themselves with beating the crap out of each other on the football field, I had the slightest feeling that I did not have very many supporters right about now.

I hadn't even realized that I'd spoken out loud until Brittany responds to my question.

"Well, you have me for starters."

My face glows bright red until it matches the uniform that I am wearing. I hold my pom-poms up to cover my embarrassment in the hopes that my skin would simply just camouflage itself with them.

"Plus, isn't that your sister coming in over there?"

At this, Brittany manages to catch my attention. My head snaps up, poised, my eyes following the direction that Brittany is pointing. Much to my surprise, it _is_ indeed Rachel, squeezing her way through the crowded bleachers towards a seat. She is followed by her friends from the glee club, trailing behind her like little ducklings, all in a row. She settles herself against the cool metal benches and immediately begins to scan the bodies of Cheerios in front of her in search for me.

It is not long before we lock eyes. Her shoulders relax, she puts a soft, awkward smile on her face and raises her hand up towards me in a single wave. It is obvious that the memories of our argument are still in the forefront of her mind, but it warms my heart to know that she at least showed.

I reciprocate the wave, returning that tiny, half smile.

Suddenly, I am not nearly as nervous as I had been mere moments before.

* * *

By the time that the game is over, it is hard to remember what I had been so worried about in the first place.

The Titans easily secured their first victory of the season. By half time, it had been a landslide. More importantly, I had not tripped, fallen, forgotten any of my dance moves, or else had done anything else to embarrass myself, my teammates, or to compromise my position on the Cheerios.

I log the evening in as a success. Let's just hope that my luck doesn't choose to run out here.

"Hey, great job tonight, Santana!"

I guess that this was just another thing about Lima that I was going to have to get used to. People, many of whom's names I didn't even know were suddenly coming up to me, offering me praises and well wishes as though they had been cheering me on for years. Even _I_ was finding myself having to stop periodically to remind myself that I had only just moved to this town a week ago. Some days, it felt as though I've lived here my entire life, and although it has only been a week, compared to the nearly eighteen years that I had spent living in Boston, I have never felt more at home than how I felt here in Lima.

Marching slowly off the field, I lose myself inside of the crowd; the pats on the back, the roars of congratulations... This was definitely a life that I could get used to.

I am just getting ready to round the corner into the locker room, when out of the corner of my eye, I spot Rachel standing by the main gate, leaning up against the bleachers. Her glee friends are nowhere to be found. In fact, she looks suspiciously as though she is waiting for me and when our eyes finally do meet, she beckons me silently towards her using only her eyes.

"Hey, I'll catch up with you in the locker room, okay?" I call back to Brittany, springing forward towards Rachel, elated just to know that she is actually willing to talk to me after the scene that the two of us had displayed just this morning.

I do not wait for Brittany to respond. I am not too concerned with being ditched tonight seeing as how I am playing host to the majority of William McKinley High School's Friday night plans. I make a sharp turn in the opposite direction. Rachel hides from the crowd, ducking shyly beneath the bleachers.

"Hey..." I greet her awkwardly, my voice drowned out by the thundering footsteps echoing from up above us, of the handful of straggling spectators all clamoring to leave the bleachers. It was like a whole other world under here. I kind of liked it.

"Hey." She reciprocates. Her hands are clasped behind her back, her feet shuffling nervously as she shifts her weight from one to the other like she used to do when she was nothing more than a shy little kid nervous to meet one of our parents' new friends for the first time. I cannot recall a single other time in my life that I have felt this incredibly uncomfortable talking to my sister except maybe that time when she was eight and I was eleven and I had shaved the heads of all of her Barbies, leaving her adamant in her campaign to split our shared room into two distinct halves where I was not allowed to cross her side, and she was not allowed to cross my own.

"You did a really good job tonight, Santana."

"Thank you." I breathe, because of all of the times somebody has told me these exact same words tonight, this is the most important time that I have heard them.

"No, I'm serious." She stands upright just a little bit taller when she says this. "You were really, really good. And trust me, I know performing talent when I see it. Actually, I was impressed." She smirks up at me cautiously as if to ask if it were okay that we stopped skirting around each other as though we were dancing on top of broken glass.

"You thought I was gonna be a flop, didn't you?"

"Honestly? A little." She shrugs as though to say – _can you blame me_ – and I can only laugh; a full, hearty, genuine tone. It feels right, natural, genuine for the first time all day.

"Come on," I slap her lightly against the shoulder. "Contraire to popular belief, you didn't get _all_ the talent of the family, you know."

"Only most of it."

She counters me without skipping a beat. Rachel was witty, clever. That, we both got from our dad.

"Now that I can't argue with."

"But seriously, Santana, you _are_ very talented." She is complimenting me and suddenly, I am blushing bright red all over again. "You should showcase your talents more often."

"I'm working on that one."

"I don't mean utilizing your talents for tumbling and enabling half the under-aged kids at school to get drunk by offering them a place to party."

"Touche." I swear, Rachel sounds more and more like our mother with every passing day. But still, I was wondering when the subject was going to come up. Rachel had sounded so hurt this morning, so betrayed by the idea of me changing into something that was not really _me_. I knew a confrontation was something that I would not be able to avoid all together.

"I still think that it's a bad idea, San."

"I know you do. But listen, I have it planned carefully. Everything is going to be fine, alright?" I've lost count of just how many times I have uttered this phrase today alone. My heart sinks. I can't help but to think back to the last words my father had ever spoken to me the night that fateful fire alarm had rung in.

_ "Go back to sleep, mija." _He had whispered into my ear after his blaring pager had woken the both of us up deep in the dead of night. _"I'll be back in the morning. Don't worry. Everything is going to be fine." _

"Listen, these guys, they throw parties every single weekend." I try to shake off the thought. _That_ is not something that needs to be at the forefront of my mind tonight. "They're experts, Rachel."

"How do you know, you only just met them five days ago!"

She is hurt that I am trusting the judgment of a group of people that I had only just met over the judgment of my little sister, who has been my rock for the past fourteen years now. I understand where she is coming from and all the more, I can't very much blame her, but backing down just wasn't an option anymore. I had spent enough time doing that.

"Listen, why don't you come." Her eyebrows arch and she falters because out of all of the things that she had been expecting me to say, that had not been one of them. I don't blame her. I am the first to acknowledge how strange it is for me, in my naturally over-protective nature, to be suggesting my little sister – a mere freshman in high school – come attend a party to the capacity of this one, even if it is at her own house.

"I don't think so." She settles cooly. Sure, she may not have inherited all of the talent of the family, but one thing was damn well certain; she sure as hell inherited all of the sense. "Besides, I'm in the glee club, remember? I don't exactly rate being seen at a football party."

"Don't be stupid." I wave off this concern of hers, but I am trying to convince the both of us here. "Of course you rate going to a party at your own house."

As though on cue, the second that these words come out of my mouth, our conversation is interrupted by a commotion coming from just in front of us. The last of the players are just coming off of the football field, and I use the word players loosely because for the most part, it is only the injured kids and the bench warmers left. You know, the kids who's official positions are listed as things like _water boy_ or _equipment manager_... But as I have already learned, holding any position what-so-ever on the football team is better than holding none, because they may be dragging water coolers and bags full of footballs and practice equipment behind them, but they still do so with a dangerous air of suspicion surrounding each and every one of them.

"What's up loser?"

They approach a small boy with a bit of a bowl cut, adorning a pair of thick-rimmed glasses and struggling to push himself up a particularly steep section of the main path leading towards the parking lot in his wheelchair. I recognize him as one of the kids that is in glee with Rachel. I am not very surprised when instinctively, Rachel ducks further behind the bleachers in an effort to make herself appear invisible, lest these goons spot her and choose to torment her next.

_Yeah right._ I think. _Over my dead body._

No sooner is this thought implanted firmly inside of my head than I picture these exact same kids showing up at my house later on tonight, each sporting a six pack they'd stolen from their parents' refrigerators, dawning their football jerseys, still spotlessly white from having not played so much as a single minute in tonight's game, yet dawning football jerseys all the same.

It wouldn't matter if it were Rachel's house, or if it were the damn White House, if they saw her there, they would torture her and despite _wanting_ to believe that I would be there to protect her at every twist and turn, I wasn't stupid enough to believe that when outnumbered like that, there wouldn't be very much that I could do.

I feel like an idiot having not considered this idea sooner. God, am I a terrible sister or am I a terrible sister?

"The slushee machine at 7/11 seems to be temporarily out of order." One of the football goons informs the boy in the wheelchair of this fact as the small group forms a tight circle around him like a kettle of vultures. He wouldn't be able to escape even if he tried.

"That's... that's too bad." He tries to sound disappointed by this information, but the expression doesn't quite ring completely through.

"Yeah, they're saying that it won't be fixed for an entire week." This kid is carrying a water cooler that is bigger than I am and somehow, it clicks inside of my head what he is planning before he even makes his first move. "This should at least hold you over until then." With the help of one of his equally as brainless friends, he lifts the cooler high above his head and flips it upside down so that this poor, defenseless boy is immediately drenched, consumed within a waterfall of sticky, red, freezing cold Gatorade.

They boy's mouth hangs open, dangled loosely against the hinges of his jaw as he takes a sudden, sharp inhale in response to being doused with this frozen liquid. Meanwhile, the kids that have just committed this atrocity don't seem to even realize the implications of what they have just done. Instead, they high-five each other, laughing maniacally in celebration of their success before they walk away without looking back once.

"You were saying?"

Rachel's expression screams _I told you so_. I in turn, have nothing that I can say to her. I am silenced. Rachel only shakes her head as though to seal the idea that this conversation is over.

"Look Santana, thanks for the offer but I think I"m just gonna spend the night over at Kurt's house with the rest of the glee club."

"Okay." I settle, choosing to let it go at that. Suddenly, I can no longer blame her much for being so resistant towards me offer. "Call me if you need anything, okay?"

"Shouldn't I be the one telling you that?" She smiles. It is gentle and genuine and just a little bit sad, but mostly, it leaves me yearning with the desire for everybody else to be able to see the amazing heart buried deep inside of my little sister's chest, rather than just judging her based off the clubs that she chose to join and the talents that she's decided to exhibit.

I laugh, but can only manage a soft shrug. I guess she does have a point there.

"Be careful tonight, okay Santana?" She practically begs me. "I'll see you in the morning, okay? Unless of course you need me to bail you out of jail before then." She laughs, but she is half serious, we both know this much. I watch, studying her carefully as she makes the motion to turn away from me. This time, she pauses, reconsidering her bid to leave and looks quickly over her shoulder. "I'll see you tomorrow, San."

"Yeah." I wave her off. "I'll see you tomorrow."

With one, last nod of her head, she turns back towards the crowd. "Artie!" I watch as she calls over to the boy in the wheelchair, soaking wet and sweater stiff with the sticky liquid. "Hey Artie, wait up!" She jogs the short distance towards him, intercepting his struggling bid to get all the way to the parking lot by himself in an offer that he gladly accepts. She grabs onto the handles on the back of his wheelchair, pushing him forward until they both disappear inside of the sea of cars, all jamming inside of the parking lot, struggling to escape.

For a brief moment, I stand my ground. I soak in the quiet, the solitude, embracing the feeling while I had the chance. Of course, I can only do so for so long before I am forced to move again, turn the clock back on...

I had a party that I had to attend.

* * *

In a bizarre turn of events, it is only after I have been provided the courtesy of showering and changing out of my flashy, uniform and receiving a full blown makeover from Brittany that I feel more uncomfortable than ever inside of my own skin.

The thick layer of make up, the skin-tight outfit that Brittany had allowed me to borrow tonight, it all feels fake, like a thick layer of plastic covering up the true me. Of course, I have felt that way all week long now so that when I am led inside of my own house by Brittany, I try to act as casually as possible.

"Are you ready for this?" She asks me as I scramble to hide the last of the most important valuables in the common areas of my home and lock all of the bedroom doors.

"I think so." I am more than certain I have forgotten something. I try to go over the mental checklist I have been gradually preparing inside of my head all day but nothing profound comes to mind and probably won't until it is already too late. "I went to the grocery store after school today and picked up a couple of things. Do you think this will be enough food?"

I pull out two plastic bags full of chips, crackers, salsa – typical party foods. Brittany just cocks her eyebrows, giving me a strange look. My shoulders slump. I feel like an idiot already.

"Oh, I don't think that people are going to be worried about the food." There is a sly air behind her tone. I had a feeling that this was going to be the case. "That's why I brought this with me." I watch her carefully as she shrugs her backpack off from around her shoulders and lays it down against the table. Opening it, she pulls out a rather large bottle, handling it with a delicacy you might expect with an expensive bottle of years-old scotch, not a cheap handle of Rubinoff.

"My older sister got it for me." She explains to me. "Do you have any shot glasses?"

"Shot glasses?" I question, because although now this seems obvious, it is something that had not even come to my mind before. "Um... yeah, I think I have some laying around somewhere."

I am left in a scramble. My mom has to have at least a couple of them. My dad loved shot glasses, he used to collect them commemorating special occasions; vacation spots, different fire stations, you know, things like that. She wouldn't just throw something like that away. I tear through the cabinets in my frantic search.

"I just have to find them." I laugh nervously. "We're still unpacking so things are kind of everywhere... Oh, here they are." With a rush of relief, I find a segmented box buried underneath the kitchen sink, carefully housing a hand full of old shot glasses. I pull it out, handling the tiny glasses with caution, passing them to Brittany who wastes no time in filling two. She pulls one towards herself, and pushes the second towards me. I eye the drink nervously.

"Cheers." She raises her glass to eye level and tips it over towards me, indicating for me to follow her lead, which I do eagerly. "To a good night."

Our glasses touch together with a satisfying clink. The clear contents slosh slightly, but never spill from the edge of the glass as I lift it to my pursed lips and hold my breath, squeezing my eyes shut as I pour the contents down my throat.

I move much too slowly. By the time I am halfway finished with the miniscule portion of alcohol, my throat is already burning. I might as well have just drank fire. With a hearty grimace plastered against my face, I put the shot glass back down against the kitchen counter still half full. My shoulders are stiff with tension, my face wrinkled in disgust. I am afraid to so much as breathe for fear that if I do, it will just trigger my gag reflex and I will throw up all over Brittany.

The blonde takes one good look at me and immediately starts to laugh. My face immediately flushes, but suddenly I cannot tell if the heat is a product of the embarrassment, or from the liquor that I just drank.

"You act like you're new at this." She makes this observation, but then again, a blind man probably could have figured that much out by now.

"Can I be honest with you?" I ask her, smacking the words against my tongue as the lingering effects of the vodka still prickle against its tip.

"Of course." Brittany nods. She leans in closer towards me, resting her chin inside of the palm of her hands as though to indicate that she is all ears.

I am struck by her sudden genuinity. Maybe it was the shot I had just taken, or maybe it was the spiral of emotions that have been consuming me all week now, or else a bizarre combination of both of these factors, but I am suddenly lost inside of her perfect features; the ripe curve of her cheek, the spark behind her sky blue eyes. I want to tell her everything; that it is not Puck that I am fiending after, but her. I want to tell her that I am a phony; that I have never been on a cheerleading squad, or drank liquor with friends on a Friday night, or even _had_ friends to drink liquor on a Friday night with... I get the remarkable sense that she is one of very few people that would judge me.

"I... I..." The only problem is, I can't seem to find the right words. I don't even know where to begin. I have known this girl for a week and already, I have a life time of secrets that I am just waiting to pour out. "I've never really drank before."

It isn't exactly what I was going for but hey, at least it's the truth.

"Seriously?" Her eyes widen as though this is the most surprising bit of information that she has heard all day. Come to think of it, it probably _is_ the most surprising bit of information that she has heard all day. I'm more than positive that she had anticipated me being a seasoned partier. I shrink in defeat, embarrassed. I _had_ been drunk once before. I was nine and it was a complete accident. My mother had made a tray of Jell-O shots for a Christmas party and me, thinking that they were just regular, Christmas Tree Jell-O molds, had ate the entire thing...

Somehow however, I was willing to bet that that did not count.

"You know what," She tells me after taking a brief pause in order to consider everything that I had just told her. I cringe, fully expecting to be made fun of by the one person I truly just wanted to be able to see me for who I really was; not this fake cheerleader, popular bimbo Santana, but the quiet, yet fiercely loyal, loving Santana. "I think that that's pretty cool."

I exhale a remarkable sigh of relief, so big that I nearly choke on it.

"Really?"

"Yeah." She tells me. "To be yourself and all of that, that's really brave, S. It's tough sticking up for something that you believe in. Especially when you're you know, popular and stuff like that... What did you do before?"

"Before?" I question.

"Yeah, like at all of the parties you went to when you lived in Boston?"

"Parties?" I scramble to procure a believable answer. "I... well, I... I was usually the D.D."

"Oh." She says with a casual shrug that tells me that at least she believes the lie. "That sucks."

"It wasn't bad."

"You sound nervous." She laughs in her observation. The truth is, I _am_ nervous. I am nervous about this party, I am nervous about being alone here in my house with Brittany while she is pouring shots down my throat, and I am worried about the means by which my mother will choose to murder me if I were to get caught tonight. So yes, I was nervous, and for good reason.

In my general opinion anyway.

"I guess I'm just a little worried about this party is all." I admit. "If my mom finds out, I'm dead."

"Well there's your problem!" She tells me, pouring yet another shot into each one of our respective glasses. "You need to stop worrying so much, everything is going to be fine. Here, have another drink. It will help, I promise."

I do not deny her offer. I am willing to take anything if it will help me get through this night with a little bit more ease. I pick up the glass and tip its contents down the back of my throat, amazed by how much easier it is going down the second time around.

"You don't have to be anybody's designated driver tonight." Brittany comments off hand, and she does have a point. I am starting to feel better already. Slamming the glass down against the table in front of her, I beckon her to pour me another.

Within the hour, my house goes from being completely empty, to being so packed full of people that I have to squeeze through a tight maze of bodies just to get from one room to the other.

The music is blaring loudly, echoing against the walls. There is a bass line thumping so loudly that I can feel it bouncing against my very insides. I have enough of Brittany's vodka inside of me that it is giving me a headache. But I am out of reasons to worry. I have not a care in the world and am trying to remember to thank Brittany for providing me with this little bit of liquid luck to get me through the night, but I've lost sight of her and can't seem to spot her through the dense haze of bodies of which I am just another one of now. Here I was, one amongst this group of kids doing everything in their power to drink the clocks backwards until it has finally gotten to the point that we are able to convince ourselves that nothing has ever really changed. That everything is perfectly capable of staying this easy and care-free forever.

What had I been so worried about again?

"Hey Santana, come over here and play with me. I need a partner!" I am beckoned over towards my mother's long, antique dining room table that has since been converted from a work of fine art, to a work of art of an entirely different sort. A pyramidal array of red solo cups is displayed perfectly at either end. There are two boys from the football team at the far side of the table, and on the other, Finn who is waving over towards me, beckoning for me to join him.

"What's going on?" I ask him, hiccupping slightly; a blatant effect of the hard liquor that was easily ebbing its way over my process of coherent thought.

"Beer pong." Finn explains vaguely. "I need a partner, are you in?"

"How do you play?"

"Are you serious?" He laughs as though I have just asked him the directions on how to play Checkers, or Go Fish, or some other ridiculously obvious game that everybody in their right mind has ever played at some point in their lives. "You've never played beer pong before?"

I can only shake my head. Out of the corner of my eye, I catch a flash of white and watch as a ping pong ball soars from the hands of one of the kids standing across from me, taking a perfect trajectory before landing with a satisfying _plunk_ inside of one of the solo cups in front of me.

"Well first of all, drink this." Finn laughs, plucking the cup from its respective position amidst the stack and handing it to me.

"What is it?" I scrunch up my nose, sniffing at the mysterious liquid with distaste, recognizing the strong scent of beer almost immediately.

"Natty Lite, what do you think?"

I shrug as though to say _what the hell_. I had been satisfied sipping off of Brittany's vodka up until this point, but in the care-free attitude that it had since allowed me to adapt, I was willing and able to try anything new. How much damage could a little mixing do?

I take a small sip but immediately cough and splutter so that a spew of foam shoots out of my mouth. The taste is bitter against my tongue and makes me gag; this is not like the vodka that Brittany had given me, not even close. I would gladly drink an entire bottle of that over one lousy cup of this stuff any day.

How do people drink this crap?

"Not much of a beer drinker, huh?" Finn laughs at my own expense, taking a generous sip out of the can that he has cradled inside of his own hand before aligning the ping-pong ball for his own shot. He takes it. The ball flies straight past the target where it bounces off of the floor and rolls into the crowd standing behind the table.

"Not really." I admit, before following Finn's lead, grabbing my own ball from the cup of water beside me, closing one eye in an effort to scope out my exact target. This game seems easy enough. I guess it must be if it was designed to be played by a bunch of drunks.

With a flick of my wrist, I release the ball. It curves perfectly through the air. I know that it is a good shot the second that it is out of my hands. The sound of the plastic hitting liquid is the most satisfying noise I've heard all night. Finn roars with approval, turning to high five me enthusiastically.

"You're a natural!" He informs me, and I smile; I guess this is just yet another of the raw talents I never even knew that I had before I'd come to Lima.

I guess that I had done good.

Four games later and I have single-handedly shepherded Finn and I into an undefeated record, picking off our victims one by one.

I am at the stage where my acquired taste for beer has only grown stronger as my taste buds fizzle into a state of insignificance. I would drink anything as long as it had alcohol in it at this point.

A crowd is starting to form around us, watching in awe of my apparent talents. They cheer our two-man team to victory after endless victory. I am satisfied, but I know that my luck cannot last forever. My vision is already starting to double, my senses dulling so that I know I will only be able to sink a ping-pong ball into a tiny cup for so much longer. The novelty wears off quickly. It is only a matter of time before yet another distraction captures the attention of this group of antsy, drunken teenagers.

I am caught off guard by a sudden series of cheers emanating from over by the couch, pressed up against the living room window. I pause with my hand still poised, ready to take my next shot, craning my neck in an effort to see what all of this commotion is about, but the crowd is too large. I can't make out anything that is inside of the tightly packed inner-circle.

But it is only a matter of time before a gap forms in between the jumble of bodies. My eyes catch the distinct flash of blonde hair – _Brittany_.

My heart jumps inside of my throat. Her back is turned towards me, but I can tell that she is sitting on top of somebody else's lap, straddling his hips with her face pressed against his; a fleeting moment of passion that apparently cannot be bothered even by a large crowd hooting and hollering all around them. Brittany is sucking on Sam Evans' face as though she were starving to death.

My eyes narrow. The more I pretend not to be bothered by all of this, the more my stomach knots around itself. I know that the idea of Brittany and I had been nothing more than wishful thinking from the very start, and maybe it was the alcohol enhancing my sense of jealousy, or maybe it was the fact that I actually thought we had bonded to a deeper, more profound relationship with each other in the past week, but going into tonight, I actually thought that I might have a chance.

I guess the liquid luck that I had been hoping for tonight wasn't going to come through after all.

"Hey." A tap on my shoulder pulls me out of my trance. I tense, nervous that it is somebody about to call me out for blatantly staring at Brittany, watching her make out with her boyfriend with a clear expression of jealousy written across my face. When I turn, I only see Puck. He holds a half-full bottle of beer inside of his hand as he uses his body language to gesture for me to follow him.

"Come outside with me?"

He doesn't have to ask me this twice. I abandon my position on the beer pong table mid-game, escaping the suddenly overwhelming crowd behind me by allowing Puck to guide me through my own house by the hand, where he leads me outside and onto the back porch.

It is quiet back here. The second that the glass, sliding doors shut behind us, the noise of the party subsides instantly. The realization comes as a relief to me. Back here, it is like I am in a whole other world.

Puck is quiet for a moment. Instead of talking, he busies his hands, pulling one of my lawn chairs closer towards me, he sits down, taking a casual sip of his beer before resting it down against his knee. His heel taps against the concrete. He appears almost nervous. I find the entire situation bizarre. I have never seen Noah Puckermas anything less than glistening with confidence before.

"I've been out here most of the night." He breaks the silence, tilting back inside of his chair so that he can look up towards the sky. I follow his eyes. A storm is brewing overhead in the distance, I can tell. Swirls of angry, grey clouds reflect in a distant flash of lightning that ignites the sky only briefly before it fades right back into pitch blackness. It looked like the absolute end of days, which was ironic considering the fact that I haven't felt this alive in ages.

"Funny, you didn't strike me as the anti-social type."

"There's a lot that you don't know about me, Santana Corcoran." There it was, that confidence; so profound, it almost came off as arrogance. I smile. There was something pure, something genuine about him that attracted me so. I felt like there was so much that I could relate to with him; not with Puck so much as I could with Noah.

"Well there's a lot that you don't know about me, Noah Puckerman." I reciprocate, wondering suddenly who this flirt was and what she had done with the shy, introverted, uncertain girl that had lived within this shell a mere week ago.

He smiles, a crooked grin that flashes just enough of a set of perfectly white teeth to get my knees shaking. He interprets this vulnerability as a perfect opportunity to make a move. I watch as he reaches out, grasping my hand inside of his own, pulling me down so that I am settled inside of his lap, forced to look directly into his eyes the entire time.

"Brittany came to talk to me." He tells me. "You know, before -"

"Before she decided to have sex with her boyfriend on my couch?" I finish his sentence for him. They are harsh and I immediately recoil with regret the second they are out of my mouth. I hope they do not strike him with the tone of too much jealousy, because that expression does not suit me very well at all.

"Yeah." He nods, his face scrunching apologetically. "Before that."

"What did she come to talk to you about?" I ask, curious although I have an idea that I already know the answer to that question. Brittany has been proclaiming her abilities as match-maker all week, promising to make Noah and I a couple by the time school was back in session at the end of the weekend.

I guess she'd finally found her chance to pounce upon the opportunity.

"Us." He says, but then reconsiders the bluntness of his words and eases into it a little bit smoother. "Well, the idea that there is potential for there to actually be an us."

"An us?" I question, because I am not entirely sure whether or not this is his means of trying to ask me out because to be honest, I've never really been asked out by anybody before, not genuinely anyway. I am not entirely certain how this whole process works aside from everything that I'd seen on TV or in the movies and I learned a learn time ago not to believe anything you've ever watched on a television screen.

Fairy tale endings only ever come true in Hollywood.

"Yeah." He confirms. "Like you being my girlfriend, you know?"

If I had a dollar for every time I had been caught off guard and left stammering stupidly from something that somebody had said to me tonight, I would be a rich woman by now.

My brain is fogged over, hazy with lust alongside the added effect of all of the alcohol that I had consumed tonight. One part of me wanted to tell him that I was not interested. That I had my sights currently set on somebody else; somebody that just so happened to be making out with another boy on my living room couch as we speak.

With that thought in mind, it is no surprise that I am only silent. I guess that he interprets my silence as a positive response, because the next thing I know, he is leaning closer and closer into me, moving slowly in order to give me the opportunity to resist should he have been getting the wrong signal, but I never do pull back and the next thing that I know, our lips come together and mesh into one, cohesive unit.

For a brief second, it strikes me that I have absolutely no idea what to do. I have never been much of a lover before. Of course, I have never really been much of _anything_ before in terms of something like this so I guess that I don't really have much to base it on.

I was so sick of this emptiness existing inside of my heart, so tired of living in this constant state of fear that I would be alone my entire life. I had spent the better half of the last week trying my very hardest to stand up against all of these inner demons, to fight them in an outward expression towards the fact that nobody should ever have to feel as terribly as I had felt in the last seventeen years of my life. But until now, I never could manage to pick myself up and do anything about it so tonight, right here, right now I did the most logical thing that I could think to do; I closed my eyes, I mimicked his motions, and I opened my mouth into his kiss, giving him access; a personalized message of approval.

"Wow..." He stammers, pulling away only just as I begin to think that I am going to run out of air and pass out with the two of us still interlocked together. I can't tell if this is a good wow, or a bad one. I am half expecting him to come outright and tell me that that was the worst kiss that he has ever had in his life. I judge his expression, looking to read his response. The smile on his face makes him look like a little school boy. There is not an ounce of distaste on a single one of his features.

"Yeah," I laugh nervously, brushing my tangled hair back with my fingers. "Wow."

"Santana Corcoran." He reaches out, holding my hand tightly with both of his own. "You are a threat to the bad-ass in us rebels everywhere." He plasters a goofy, boyish smile on his face, leaning in to kiss me once more. I find myself unable to help but to smile into his mouth, eliminating the fear that had been gradually budding inside of me for years now that I would die without ever knowing the meaning of a first, true kiss; that feeling of all of those nerves rushing subtle shockwaves through your lips until your heart begins to beat straight up and out of your chest.

This was all I needed.

The second time around, I am the one that breaks the kiss. Suddenly, the only thing that I want to do is slow down time itself. I want to embrace this moment. I want to remember it for what it is, capture it in a single-framed photo inside of my head forever.

I inhale the crisp, fall night air, taking gradual, steady breaths as I bury my head inside of the crook of Noah's shoulder, allowing him to wrap his muscular arms around my shoulders to pull me closer and closer into his body.

"What are you looking at?" He finally asks me after a couple of moments of a distinct, yet comfortable silence.

"The clouds." I tell him.

"What, like heaven and shit?" I pause, considering this. The truth was, I hadn't been trying to find anything in particular, but now that he mentioned it, I suppose that was exactly what I was looking for.

Isn't that what everybody was looking for?

"I guess." I shrug.

"Well, to hell with heaven." He laughs at his own, clever pun. "You're here for now and that's all I need."

When his fingertips brush against the underside of my chin, I shudder. He tilts my head up so that our lips align perfectly. I close my eyes once more and lean into him. As I kiss this boy before me, my stomach begins to bubble, completely redefining the term _gut feeling_ to me.

Suddenly, I am not thinking about just how much I had to drink tonight. Suddenly, I am not thinking about the Cheerios or about Rachel or even about Brittany doing God only knows what at this point with Sam on my living room couch. Instead, the only thing that I am thinking about is Noah, and about me, but more importantly, about the two of us now merged together as one single, cohesive unit.

Now, I know that this might not be particularly fair of me. I know that Noah was falling for, not the girl that was sitting here outside with him tonight, but the girl that he _thought_ she was. I know that his heart was not entirely mine to have, nor was mine his to give but for right now, I pretended like it was and for the time being, that was okay with me.

If there is one thing that I have learned it is that in this life, I can make the best out of _any_ great situation.

This time, when our lips part, it is unintentional, stimulated by the sound of shattering glass coming from somewhere inside of the house.

"I should probably go check on that." I groan into his mouth without particularly rushing to leave Noah's side.

"I'll come with you." He offers me the grace of his company, holding carefully onto my hips as I pull myself off of his lap and onto my feet. We stand side by side, our hands interlocked, fingers laced around one another's the entire time. I squeeze his hand gently and move towards the door, our hips swaying in unison, side by side the entire time.

Inside, I weave through the sea of bodies with a varying degree of difficulty. Everywhere I turn, there seems to be somebody here that I hadn't seen before; some people that look vaguely familiar from school, some people that I am certain I have never seen before in my entire life. I hadn't exactly been expecting this party to get so big. I guess that was my first mistake.

"Ugh, look at that She-Man. Jesus, she looked like a tranny even when she was a baby."

The source of the commotion becomes quickly obvious. Inside of my living room, I notice that Quinn Fabray has finally decided to make her late entrance. I find her standing directly in front of a series of pictures mounted on my living room wall. She has a glass of wine in one hand, and in the other, a picture frame that I recognize as one that had been propped against my coffee table only moments before. Her eyes dance across it. She studies the image like she would a text book, interpreting its every fault, its every error, careful to point out what she sees to the cackling group of Cheerios surrounding her.

"Hey, Fabray, you better back the hell off!"

Not even I recognize my own voice. I don't know where the hell this tone has come from, but suddenly, I find myself yanked my hand out of Noah's, the peace and tranquility and happiness that I had been overwhelmed with only minutes ago dissipating into an anger I have never before felt as I take a handful of threatening steps closer towards Quinn. It's as though somebody's flipped a light switch. I am livid.

My shoulders are hunched, my chest heaving. Quinn and I, we haven't exactly been getting along. From the day that we had met, there had always been something, some invisible barrier separating us. I had been on my last straw with her _before_ the additional, enabling effects of the alcohol had been a factor. Now she was coming into _my_ house and mocking _my _family.

I didn't think so.

Quinn turns towards me, a malevolent smile plastered across her face so that I know I have just walked directly into the trap that she had been trying to set up for me this entire time. "Or what?" She jeers, placing the photo back down against the coffee table. I recognize it immediately. It was my mother's favorite of Rachel and I, taken when Rachel was four and I was about seven or eight. It was taken the morning of the Boston Marathon as we sat amidst the crowd, gathered by the hundreds along the end of the route right outside of the Boston Public library. I sat on my father's shoulders, strong and supportive, knowing beyond reasonable doubt that he would protect me from up there, higher even than any of the skyscrapers that surrounded me, or so it seemed at the time. Rachel, in turn, was on my mother's back, clamoring to get as high up as I was, but my mom could barely boast 5'5" on a good day. My father always towered over all three of us.

Rachel didn't even come close to reaching.

"You don't just get to come inside of my house and start saying whatever the hell you want about me, or my family, Fabray." All around me, I can feel the watchful eyes of my classmates and peers as they start to form a circle around us, whispering excitedly about the prospects of a girl-fight brewing in their midst. As my voice grows louder, it only seems to draw more and more attention. "I don't know what the hell your problem is with Rachel or with me, but I will show you what _my_ problem is with _you_ if you don't if you don't take your little friends and get the hell out of my house right now."

I hear an elongated whistle of encouragement coming from somebody in the crowd before us. It offsets a series of cheers as more and more people begin to gather, waiting for something extraordinary to happen. All around me, kids are pulling their cell phones from their pockets, anxiously awaiting to capture a video of Quinn and I fighting, providing ample evidence of the illegality of my actions, ready and able to pop up all over the internet by the top of the hour I suddenly struggle to care. For one reason or another, Quinn Fabray had a tendency to bring out the worst in me.

I march up to her threateningly until we are standing chest-to-chest. I can feel her breath against my skin, hot and heavy. It makes me suddenly claustrophobic. I no longer feel comfortable being this close in proximity with Quinn, so I do the one thing that I can think to do; I place my hands firmly against her shoulder and give her a strong shove.

She stumbles backwards, thrown briefly off of her guard. Clearly, she had not expected me to come outright and respond with violence.

The crowd erupts in their approval. They might as be watching a UFC fight at a local bar. By this time, there is a clear perimeter formed around the two of us, our audience naturally separating themselves from the two of us in an effort to give us the space that we required in order to rip each other's heads off.

"Don't touch me!" Quinn counters by pushing me right back, but I had been expecting this; my stance is already staggered. I fall back a couple of steps, but otherwise retain my ground. The thing that _does_ catch me by surprise, is a hand wrapping firmly around my upper arm from behind.

"Santana, come on." It is Noah. Had it only been minutes since the two of us had been walking on air with one another, vehemently proclaiming our love? It was certainly starting to seem like it. "Let's go back outside. Quinn can go home, you can cool off..."

"No." Despite my better judgement, I rip my arm out of Noah's grasp and barge forward back towards Quinn. He doesn't bother chasing after me. Maybe it is because he knows that Quinn Fabray has it coming to her. Maybe it is because he knows he would be a hypocrite if he tried. I am more than certain that Noah has been in a lot of fights before, most of which were probably over something a lot stupider than this. "Quinn has wanted this since the day that I moved in here, so here's your opportunity Quinn. Why don't you take it?"

"You know what, you're right." Quinn admits, slinking forward until she is directly in my face. I can smell the alcohol on her breath, feel the wind rushing as she begins whipping accusing fingers in my face. "I have wanted this since the day that you came here, sneaking into my town, my life like some kind of pariah. You've been here less than a week, Santana and already you are trying to steal my friends, my life, my reputation... You know what, why don't you just go ahead and take your creepy ass, weirdo sister and go back to wherever the hell you came from."

"You better watch what you say about my sister."

I am willing to give her this final warning, because when Rachel starts coming into the picture, I am done trying to reason peacefully. The second that she crosses this line, I am done pretending like this will end with a mere exchange of strong words before ultimately, I get bored of it and kick her out.

My fingers twitch into fists, my breaths growing heavier and heavier. I have never felt so angry before and it seems to only be escalating. If I was being honest here, the whole thing was starting to scare me.

"What are you going to do, Santana? Are you going to hit me?" My subtle motions to not go unnoticed by Quinn. She is antagonizing me, begging me to do something she thinks I am going to regret once I am sober. "You know what I think? I think that you don't have the balls."

I would like to believe that she is right but I have never felt like this before so that I really don't know what it is that I am truly capable of. I _want_ to hit her, that is for damn sure.

"Why don't you do it?" She taunts me, pushing me gently over and over and over again so that I can practically feel my brains rolling around inside of my head. "Let's go, I know that you want to. Hit me! Hit me!"

I lunge at her request. The action is completely devoid of my own control. It is as though my muscles are responding on their own accord and before I know it, I am airborne, diving towards Quinn with my hands drawn in front of me. I grab onto her by the shoulders, using my momentum to pull her down onto the ground. I get her onto her back easily, and crawl on top of her, pinning her torso with my knees as she struggles and flails beneath me.

I ball my fingers into fists that are so tight, my fingernails draw blood inside of my own palms. I am wailing down at her. I do not care _where_ it is on her body that I hit, as long as I am hitting her.

The dull thump of flesh against flesh sounds like music to my ears. The stinging resonating deep inside of my knuckles is a satisfying pain.

But Quinn recovers quickly, using her hips as well as her firm core to buck my body off of her own, sending me sprawling to the ground. I scramble to return upright before Quinn can get on top of _me_ and release her own reign of fury. We square up and size each other with our eyes. She is looking maniacal with an expression of pure rage clear across her face, her nose bleeding and a prominent bruise already forming in the corner of her forehead.

"You bitch!" She spits, wiping at the blood with the back of her hand, and this time, it is her turn to come towards _me_. I see a flash, feel the rush of air, and before I know it, Quinn's fist is colliding with my cheek bone, directly beneath my right eye, which swells up with tears immediately in its natural response to being so crudely violated.

I falter slightly. I have never been hit before in my entire life and to be honest, I didn't think that Quinn Fabray had it in her.

I guess that we had both underestimated each other.

I take a moment, but still make it a point to get back to my feet quickly, determined to stop acting like a victim. I am ready to counter-attack, ready to keep up this fight for as long as I have to, but just as I am about to make the first move, I am pulled back by a group of strong hands, finally intervening to separate Quinn and I.

I struggle briefly against my bindings, but they are relentless. Directly across from me, Finn is struggling to restrain his own girlfriend.

"Santana!" I recognize Noah's voice. I guess he had figured that we had vented enough. It was time to end this before it escalated any further. "Santana, stop! Get off of her!"

"I'm going to kill her!" I roar like a savage in my threat, jerking and bucking inside of Noah's arms in an attempt to detangle myself from the web created by his well-built muscles. But Noah Puckerman was not the star of the William McKinley High School football team because he was weak. He holds me back with ease.

"You might not want to do that." He warns me.

"Why not?" I bark right back because I am quite positive that I can evaluate my own thoughts for myself, and I am more than positive that yes, I do indeed feel like murdering Quinn Fabray right about now.

"Because..." He pauses as though he is about to say something that he would really rather not say, but knows that he has to; like those police officers who had come knocking on my apartment that fateful day, assigned with the task of telling my mother that my father was dead.

The memory alone leaves me falling slack inside of his arms.

"The cops are here."


	6. Dismantle, Repair

**Hello everybody! Sorry it's been a bit longer than usual, I feel like it's been forever now. I am finally back from spending the last week and a half in the desert, so that is where I've been. I hand wrote the majority of this chapter in my little field notebook and then typed it up as quickly as I could in order to get it up and running so if it gives off that vibe, that is why! I've also been getting a little over excited. I have a couple of twists and turns planned for the next couple of chapters that I have already been writing before I even get there (which includes something for all of you that have been so patiently waiting for some Brittana action) so if it also happens to give off that vibe as well, well there you have it. **

**As always, thank you everybody for giving me and my story a chance. It really does mean a lot and I appreciate every last one of you!**

* * *

**Chapter 6**** –** Dismantle, Repair

"Ms. Corcoran, I am sure that you understand how serious a matter that this is!"

The thick, Indian accent of my high school principal bounces obnoxiously inside of my ears and rattles at my very brains. Maybe it is the way that he speaks, or maybe it is the idea that I had spent the entirety of this weekend hearing nothing other than about how badly I screwed up by anybody who stepped within a mile radius of me, but the only thing that I interpret with every syllable that he speaks is – _you're screwed, you're screwed, you're screwed._

"She understands."

My mother is standing directly behind me as she answers the question for me, giving me a firm nudge between my shoulder blades as she does so. It is her way of silently informing me that I better start speaking up for myself, and I better be doing so with some _yes sir_ and_ no sir's_ if I knew what was good for me.

The small room is crowded to the brim, people packed like sardines from wall to wall. Aside from my mother and I, Principal Figgins sits at his desk. Next to me, Quinn sits, her fingers drumming nervously against the wooden arm of her chair while her own tight-lipped blonde mother stands behind her with a permanent expression on her face as though she had just ate something incredibly sour. Her resemblance to Quinn is impeccable. I entertain myself by wondering whether or not their is a father involved in this picture, or if Quinn is simply just a clone. The idea of Quinn Fabray spawning as a test-tube baby almost brings a smile to my face.

_Almost_.

Directly behind Principal Figgins, Sue Sylvester stands at a perfect parade-rest. Her eyes dart frantically back and forth between Quinn and I, sizing us up, waiting for us to start explaining how and why her two best cheerleaders had ended Friday night at each other's throats. Literally.

Quinn and I are separated by a good five feet. She is seated at one wall, and me at the other. It is almost as though they are afraid that the two of us will pounce on top of each other and begin fighting again at a moment's notice. I am offended that they think us that stupid. As it is, I am still so sore from Friday night that I could barely so much as drag my aching muscles out of ed this morning, let alone engage in another fist fight, even if it was with Quinn.

We both are still looking relatively worse for the wear. I have been sporting black eye since I woke up on Saturday morning, and it only seems to be getting worse. The bridge of Quinn's nose is swollen and bruised. I am amused by the idea that racoon eyes do not compliment her delicate features. Both of our knuckles are still cut up and raw.

"I understand." I echo my mother's sentiments. Her shadow looms over me, threatening. Her arms are crossed over her chest, jaw set so tight I am afraid it might snap at any given moment. I have never seen my mother look so intimidating in my life; well, that is if you don't count Saturday morning when she had stormed into the house after driving all night, the three hours that separated Lima from Cleveland. The police had called her almost immediately upon their breaking up my party, and she had had only one of two options; either she come home and sign me back into her custody, or I spend the night in a jail cell until she could return.

I am surprised that I am not _still_ rotting in prison.

She had nearly missed her club's Sectionals performance because of the unexpected trip back to Lima. The entire debacle had left her hard pressed to come up with an on-the-spot excuse to deliver to her boss as to why she had arrived back in Cleveland, with only minutes to spare. I am almost positive that she hadn't told him the truth. I can't say that I really blame her.

The only reason that she had managed to talk her way into keeping the job that she'd taken such a chance on moving her entire family nearly a thousand miles west just to accept, was because Vocal Adrenaline had easily secured a victory. For that at least, I am grateful.

I had nearly cost my mother her job. I haven't been able to look her in the eye since I'd seen her on Saturday. I was afraid to see the look of disappointment on her face, the anger as she delivered me my punishment, grounding me for the first time in my seventeen years, the confusion as she struggled to decipher who this new girl who had swooped down to replace her kind, gentle, innocent daughter was.

"This school has a very strict zero-tolerance policy for both partying as well as violence. You and Ms. Fabray have found yourselves guilty of both of these infractions! You are both now liable for suspension which means you will miss two weeks of school plus, you will be disqualified from any and all extracurricular activities, including the Cheerios for the rest of the school year!"

"Now wait a minute, Principal Figgins!" With the mere mention of a possibility of Quinn losing her spot on the Cheerios, she puts her foot down. This is the most animated that I have seen her act all day. "Santana Corcoran is the one that came after _me_. I was just trying to defend myself from this lunatic!"

"The fact of the matter, Ms. Fabray is that you were clearly seen at a party where children were in possession of alcohol and when the police were called in, you were found trying to pull out Ms. Corcoran's hair. I saw the video! It has over thirty thousand views on Youtube!"

"Thirty three thousand four hundred and seventy two to be exact." Coach Sylvester chimes in with the precise number of hits her two new Internet sensations have received in the past weekend alone with an icy tone attached to the back of her voice. I cringe. It strikes me with a sudden force like a train that the usually loud, outspoken Cheerios coach has been unusually quiet up until this point. "Luckily for the two of you, while you were off auditioning for the latest episode of _Cheerleaders Gone Wild_, I was composing a brand new curriculum for a conditioning practice that involves taking a trip down to Paul Brown Stadium and running a _Tour de Stade_ for as long as I am legally allowed to make you. It's four and a half hours. I checked."

Her track suit glistens blood red as she places her hands firmly against her hips, solidifying her final tone regarding this matter. I have absolutely no idea what a _Tour de Stade_ is, but I am more than certain that I am about to find out. I am even more certain that I am not going to like it.

"Now wait a minute Sue, Ms. Fabray and Ms. Corcoran's actions cannot just go without consequent!"

"Oh I assure you that the crippling pain of four and a half hours of forced physical endurance courses will be plenty consequence." Coach Sylvester informs him matter-of-fact. "I can't have my two star cheerleaders looking like they just came back from being extras in the movie _Fight Club_. It will ruin our chance at Nationals. I promise you that the ruthless burning that will plague the delicate muscles of their quadriceps and calves will outlast any other punishment that you may have planned for these two."

"Corporal punishment is not necessary _or_ effective, Sue. Nor is it legal!"

"Nonsense," Coach Sylvester counters quickly. "When I was in Fallujah I made my unit run ten miles in full combat gear for questioning my skills as an experienced navigator. If only they had listened to me in the first place, this ridiculous war could have ended in 2004! Do you know how hot it gets in Fallujah, Figgy? _Two hundred degrees_!"

"Um... excuse me."

There is a knock at the door and immediately, six pairs of eyes dart towards the sound of the intruder. I recognize my Spanish teacher, Mr. Schuester almost immediately. He looks uncomfortable, hesitant to be interfering in the midst of this argument, but who looks even _more_ uncomfortable is the girl that is standing directly behind him.

Rachel.

"William, now is not a very good time to-"

"Actually, Principal Figgins..." Mr. Schuester cuts the man off carefully, "I thought that I might be able to help you with your – um – dilemma."

"Unless you are here to throw Rocky Jr here under the firey fist of justice right alongside her delinquent sister and accomplice, William than your presence here is neither needed, nor desired."

"She didn't do anything!"

All eyes move towards me in response to my sudden outburst. I hadn't meant to yell, but Coach Sylvester has finally struck a nerve and I have no choice but to put my foot down. I cannot allow Mr. Schuester to be coming in here, expecting my sister to be punished when she had absolutely no fault in the matter. Hell, she had been nothing more than my voice of reason this entire time. It was of nobody's fault but my own that I had chosen not to listen to her.

"She is an enabler!" Coach Sylvester points an accusatory finger at Rachel, who merely shrinks inside of the doorway.

"Come on Sue, be reasonable. She was not even there when the police arrived at the scene of the crime!" Principal Figgins argues in my sister's defense, and it is nice to know that I have at least somebody on my side, even if it is the man with the least amount of power regarding our punishment in the room. I am not disillusioned enough to allow his title as Principal to fool me into thinking that he will have any say in this matter.

"Of course she wasn't there! Only seven people were actually stupid enough to get caught. Come on, Figgins, even you can't be stupid enough to believe that only seven people were in attendance at a party that got called into the police under the description of being a _rager_."

Sue rambles incessantly, but she _does_ have a point. By the time the police did manage to barge into my front door, word that they were en route had gotten around the party enough so that most of the kids had already fled. Only seven had been caught at the scene of the crime; Quinn and I because we were still trying to kill each other, Puck and Finn because – as loyal boyfriends – they had been left trying to pull us apart, Sam and Brittany were still firmly attached to one another's faces, although they _had_ managed to move into my bedroom by that point, and then there was Mike Chang, poor Mike Chang who was passed out drunk over the toilet bowl, left behind by his so-called group of friends.

Him, I felt the most sorry for.

"Rachel didn't even know about the party!" I argue for Rachel's case aggressively, because of all of the people that were about to get in trouble on account of my own stupidity, Rachel was the one that I could tolerate the least. "I convinced her to sleep over her friend's house that night. I told her that I wanted... that I wanted my boyfriend to sleep over!" I come up with the lie on the spot because it is the first thing that pops inside of my head, but I am left flushing immediately red with embarrassment when I hear my mother – who I had forgotten was standing directly behind me – scoff with a combination of surprise and disapproval.

"So on top of depravity, aggravated assault, _and_ under age drinking, I guess that we can add manipulative little vixen to your list of transgressions." Coach Sylvester tics each and every one of my crimes off against her fingers. I am embarrassed to see that she almost needs to utilize the use of her second hand. "Congratulations, Airbags you have officially committed one misdemeanor crime for each day that you have been in attendance here at William McKinley High School; a new record. Mrs. Corcoran," She turns towards my mother. "You must be besides yourself with pride."

I shrink. Sue Sylvester had a knack for making me feel more embarrassed than I have ever felt in my entire life, and believe me when I say that I have had a lot of experience.

"Actually Sue, Rachel is here solely as acting captain of the glee club."

"Well this oughtta be interesting." Coach Sylvester cocks her hip outwards and crosses her arms over her chest. She waits for further explanation, the look on her face clearly indicating that she believes that this interaction will be anything _but_ interesting.

"Well the idea was actually Rachel's..."

"Please keep in mind, Figgins that this one over here spawns from the same DNA whose _idea_ it was to throw an under-aged keg party!"

"Sue, please!" The principal interrupts. Coach Sylvester throws her hands into the air, a mock expression of surrender as though to say _I'm done_. However, I am willing to bet that she is not.

"Okay, well..." Mr. Schuester gathers himself, attempts to recover quickly. I am fairly certain that at this point, he has had his fair share of experience, dealing with Sue Sylvester and her unique antics. "What Rachel was thinking – and I completely back her on this one – is that instead of punishing the girls by suspending them from school and from extra curriculars, we should be doing the exact opposite, encouraging them to work with one another through these things in order to sort out their differences."

"Go on..." Principal Figgins leans forwards inside of his chair, fingers drumming a gentle rhythm against his chin, suddenly intrigued.

"Well, as you know the glee club has their Sectionals competition coming up this coming Saturday." He offers his ideas to a roomful of confused faces. Not a single one of us are entirely certain what exactly his intentions are here. "The thing is, we are still six members short of the twelve that we need in order to qualify."

My eyes widen as I begin to understand where it is that he is going with this. Besides me, Quinn wears a similar expression of horror. Suddenly, running through an NFL stadium with Sue Sylvester until my legs fall off does not seem like that significant a punishment to face.

"It's perfect really... My suggestion is that everybody that was caught at the party on Friday night be given an opportunity to redeem themselves via a healthy, competitive distraction. It is a more productive way of spending their free time then lets say – partying. If you suspend them, what will that give you? Seven bored teenagers who literally will have an entire day to be angry about their situation, leading them to get into God only knows what kind of trouble. Let them stay in football and stay on the Cheerios, and at the same time, try out the glee club. It will be a much more productive outlet for all of their pent up energy than suspending them."

"This has got to be some kind of a joke!" Coach Sylvester vocalizes all of the doubts that I am not confident enough to express myself. I have never been more grateful for her chronic spewing of hatred. In fact, I have never been grateful for it until now. I guess that if I have learned any type of lesson this week, it is that there is a first time for everything. "It is clear that William here is trying to use these kids' foolishness for his own personal gain! Join the glee club, the idea is barbaric! Punishing teenagers for breaking the law does not constitute signing them up to sing and dance!"

"It's not meant to be a punishment-"

"No of course not!" Coach Sylvester interrupts with sarcasm so apparent behind her voice that I can almost see it dripping from the corners of her mouth. "Subjecting them to endure countless hours of public humiliation, spending their days at the bottom of a dumpster, being beat up in the hallways and having Slushees thrown on them! No, that doesn't sound like a punishment to me at all."

"The only reason that any of those things happen is because _you_ allow _your_ Cheerios to do it!" Will counters, and now him and Coach Sylvester are bickering back and forth like they have been spending the last hour trying to advise Quinn and I not to do.

"Slander!" She calls, although I don't doubt for a second that what Mr. Schuester is saying is totally true.

"It is a learning and developmental exercise, Sue." Mr. Schuester shoots back at her. "Ask anybody that is in the glee club; being a part of this has significantly improved each and every one of them. Their attitude, their morale, their grades, their confidence, have all improved because of the glee club."

"Ask them about their attitude and morale next time they're in the bathroom for half of the school day pulling ice chips out of their hair!"

"On top of that-" Mr. Schuester raises his voice, trying to drown out Coach Sylvester's aimless ramblings. "We still need one more number to complete our set list for Sectionals. Rachel here proposed the idea that Quinn and Santana be the ones responsible for coming up with both the song, as well as the choreography routine, and more importantly that they do so together."

"Sue, William here makes a very good point." Mr. Figgins cuts Coach Sylvester off just as she is opening her mouth to argue the idea further, cutting her off before she so much has the opportunity to get the words out. "The problem that these two girls have with one another needs to be sorted out in both a logical and rational manner. Making them work together on this project is a way that they can do this in a controlled environment so that it does not result in any further injuries."

"I'm sorry, but you're kidding, right?" I have been watching Quinn fidget uncomfortably for the past several minutes under the burden of being potentially volun-told to join a club that is so far down the bottom of the social totem pole, that even the kids that play _Dungeons and Dragons_ in the basement at lunch time make fun of them. I was wondering when the moment was going to come that Quinn could no longer hold her silence on the matter. "Coach Sylvester, do something! Being a part of the glee club will destroy me! They're the biggest losers at this school, everybody knows that."

Coach Sylvester stares down at Quinn, silenced for the first time in several minutes by her pathetic, pleading tone; her large, hazel eyes gaping up towards her, pleading for sympathy. I can't help but to roll my eyes, fully expecting Coach Sylvester to bail Quinn Fabray out, just like she always does. Quinn Fabray was the kind of girl that got what she wanted, when she wanted. I wish somebody would just put her in her place already.

"You know what, I've changed my mind."

Even I am surprised when Coach Sylvester merely cocks her head to the side and studies Quinn, examining her thoroughly before she turns back to Principal Figgins and expresses her change of heart with a perkiness that does not express the idea that only moments before, she had been arguing whole-heartedly against the very idea that she is now, suddenly supporting.

Through the silence, I hear Quinn Fabray scoff loudly.

"Principal Figgins, seeing as how I only condone girl-on-girl fighting when I am paying a hefty fee to watch it on HBO, I think that these two deserve to be punished. Maybe knocking them down a few notches off of their high horse, in combination with a couple of Slushee facials to top it off will be just what they need. And I can assure you that as long as they are pinned as being members of the glee club, there will be no more parties for either of them."

"Then it is done!" Principal Figgins slams his fist against his oak desk like a makeshift gavel. Judge, jury, _and_ executioner. "Ms. Fabray, Ms. Corcoran, you will attend glee rehearsals and all competitions with Mr. Schuester and his New Directions for the rest of the competitive year starting today!"

"Congratulations, ladies." Coach Sylvester's lips curl upwards into a sneer so wide that I can see every single one of her teeth. "You've just secured your own one way ticket into the wormhole. Oh, and don't forget; you are still expected at every minute of every Cheerio's practice and competition. I do not tolerate any excuse for tardiness, which is including but not limited to having to spend an extra couple of minutes in the bathroom in order to pull frozen ice chips out of your hair."

And without another word, she turns and saunters out of Principal Figgins' office, an additional swag apparent behind each and every step that she takes.

"Can I go now, Principal Figgins?"

Quinn looks like she is about to cry. I almost feel bad for her. _Almost_.

"Yes, Ms. Fabray you are free to go." The principal waves her off casually. She thrusts her body so aggressively up from her seat that it flies backwards a solid foot, screeching against the tile floor like nails on a chalkboard. The noise travels down my spine and makes me cringe. Quinn Fabray walks towards the door with her nose in the air and a confidence in her step that she has to exaggerate, because I know after the blow that she has been dealt today, she no longer feels it like she is used to. She does not wait for her mother, although the slightly shorter woman is quick to follow in her wake, walking on the balls of her feet, careful to be dainty, even in the midst of a situation such as this one.

Quinn does not so much as look at either Mr. Schuester _or_ Rachel, who are both still standing in the doorway as she marches out, her mother following closely behind her. I glare, but not only is her back turned to me, the office door is already slamming shut behind her.

Just so long as it doesn't hit her in the ass on the way out, I guess.

"Ms. Corcoran, you are also free to go." Mr. Figgins dismisses me as well. "Please be so kind as to inform your other delinquent friends to come into my office on your way out."

I stand to leave, careful not to look a single person in the room in the eye on the way out; not Principal Figgins, not Sue Sylvester, not Mr. Schuester, or my mother, and sure as hell, not Rachel. When I duck out of the room, I can feel my mother's presence, heavy behind me. She is a shadow looming over my shoulder with every step forward that I take. I move deliberately slow; a funeral march on a hot summer day. My eyes don't glance up from the floor, not once, especially not when I finally spot the rest of them – Finn, Sam, Noah, Brittany and poor Mike Chang – all seated in a line against the hard, plastic chairs, all waiting their turn to be issued the same punishment that has just been handed down to me.

A death sentence.

Okay, so maybe I was being a little bit over-dramatic. A death sentence? Maybe not. But the _glee club_? There was not a group of people within these walls that fared worse than the glee club. Even I knew that, and I was supposed to be the new kid around here.

Yes, I know that my sister has already secured her spot as poster-girl for glee. She had done that just as quickly as I myself had secured my own spot, climbing up each rung on the ladder of the social food-chain faster and faster with every step. Sure, I was happy that Rachel was happy, but at the same time, I was happy that I was happy too. I had just gotten this; this life, these friends... I guess what I am trying to say here is that I wasn't ready to say goodbye to them just yet.

Through the corner of my eye I spot Noah, silently trying to catch my attention. He is craning his neck, making sharp, rapid movements this way and that in an effort to catch my eyes. I purposefully avoid his every attempt. I have not spoken with him since Friday. I haven't spoken with _any_ of them since Friday, despite numerous attempts by each and every one of them. Hell, Noah had gone so far as to call my house last night, in which my mother answered and explained to him decisively that I was grounded from now until Kingdom Come and will not be able to speak to him on the phone tonight, or tomorrow night, or any night in the foreseeable future.

I have never been grounded before. In fact, the morning of my seventeenth birthday, my mother had joked with me that I needed to start getting myself into trouble. She was running out of time to embark on the normal responsibilities of being mother to a teenage girl while I was still legally in her care. I had laughed at the time, knowing that she was joking around because who really wants their child to get themselves into trouble, right?

Still, even if she wasn't, I do not think that this is what she had in mind.

But despite the fact that my mother has never _had_ to do it before, as it turns out, she was pretty damn good at issuing out punishments. I was grounded. That much, I had expected; but this, this was bread-and-water grounded. If I wasn't at school or Cheerios practice, I was to be in my bedroom. That, I was only allowed to leave to use the bathroom or to eat. Maybe if I was lucky, she would let me out if the house caught on fire, or something but even that I wasn't so sure about. I was not allowed to have my cell phone. No Internet. No television. No nothing.

The only good thing that I _could_ boast in regards to this party is what it has done for my reputation.

As it turns out, when the police barge into your house on a Friday night to clear a party, and find you straddling the most popular cheerleader in the school, raining blows against her body with your fists, it gives you the title of being a bad ass. It makes the rebels shrink in fear when you walk past them. It makes the popular kids want to be you.

In lament terms, it made me royalty in between these walls. I was a part of the elite.

What was going to happen to me now that I have been forced into the glee club? Even even my membership has been mandated by the powers of this school far beyond my control, my reputation is at stake here. Best case scenario I will be sitting at a table at lunch with the marching band and picking Slushee out of my hair only once or twice a day... I try to put on a neutral face, after all, Rachel was relying on me for this, plus I really, really did not want to get suspended in only my second week at William McKinley.

"Santana..."

It comes as a great surprise to me when Noah stands up and walks closer towards me rather than further away. He is a strong, broad boy. His shoulders alone block my path like a brick wall so that I am forced to a halt, allowing him to snake his strong, muscular arms around my waist and pull me close. I guess he wasn't so mad at me for getting him in trouble this weekend, or for ignoring him ever since, as I had originally suspected.

At this rate, I was planning on him rescinding the request he had made for me to be his girlfriend the second I'd actually allowed him to speak to me long enough to get the words out.

"You okay?"

"I'm fine." I shrug away from him, very conscious of the idea that both my mother _and_ my little sister are standing directly behind me. "Principal Figgins wants to see you guys."

"What happened in there?" He cranes his neck, searching my eyes for answers. His expression is full of concern and I feel immediately badly to be putting him in this situation. To be putting them _all_ in this situation. "Did you get suspended?"

I can only shake my head, a decisive _no_, but the worry never deviates from inside of his eyes.

"Okay..." He trails off because now is neither the time, nor the place for an argument. "Wait up for me."

I nod my head, ensuring him of my commitment to my promise with a soft smile. He leans forward, planting a soft kiss on the top of my head. His strong hands run up and down my arms briefly, creating the delicious heat of friction before he lets go, releases me back into the cold and brushes past me into Principal Figgins' office.

The other four stand to their feet, file off and follow Noah's lead like a group of ducklings chasing after their mother. Brittany comes last. I have an even harder time looking her in the eye than I had with Noah. She offers me a soft, sad smile that I try to reciprocate although I can not be entirey certain that effect shines through. On her way past, she reaches downward and grabs onto my hand, squeezing it quickly. A shiver runs up my spine. I can feel the hairs on the back of my neck standing on end, goosebumps raising against my skin, making me suddenly grateful that I had chosen to wear my sweater underneath my Cheerios uniform this morning.

Her touch sends a jolt of electricity up my spine, forcing my head up so that my sad, dark eyes meet hers; swimming so deep and blue that I get lost inside of them.

Why hadn't I felt this way when Noah had been holding onto me? His touch, it had been so much more sensual than a simple hand squeeze, yet at the same time, it meant so much less to me.

She doesn't say anything, but she doesn't have to. And with that, just as quickly as she has grabbed onto me, she lets go once more and I blink, and she is gone. The interaction had not lasted more than a couple of seconds at best, but to me, it felt like the entire world had stood still; just for me, and for her.

By the time Principal Figgins' door closes behind her, an entire year could have past and I wouldn't know the difference.

"Santana!"

My mother sounds angry as she calls for my attention, effectively breaking the calming silence that Brittany had allowed me to feel for the first time since Friday and I guess that I can't blame her too much for that. The two of us haven't really spoken in the last couple of days, save for her informing me that I was now grounded indefinitely. All it was between the two of us were a thousand thoughts and feelings left unsaid, just as it usually was between my mother and I. She still couldn't bring herself to look me in the eye. I guess three whole days of going over what a disappointment her oldest had turned out to be still wasn't enough.

I don't see this moment as a particularly good opportunity for her to start talking either, what with my boyfriend and the girl that I am secretly crushing on standing directly on the other side of that thin, wooden door behind me. I am quick to shrug her off, to turn out of the office without so much as a response towards my mother.

I am not at all surprised when she follows me into the main lobby. Rachel looks a bit hesitant, but chases after the two of us, remaining at a safe distance, a couple of paces behind. I guess that she must agree with me, that this is not exactly a prime spot for a delicate family meeting.

I dart for the front doors, the hopes being that I can at least get as far as outside so that we may do this more privately. I would really rather the entire school does _not_ hear what a disappointment as a daughter I am. Plus, I am sure that my mother would rather keep the number of witnesses to a bare minimum when she decides to murder me with her own bare hands, which – judging by the look on her face – will happen sooner rather than later.

"Santana Elizabeth Corcoran!"

She full-names me, her voice purposeful as it echoes down the entire length of the hallway, so loud that I am more than positive they heard it inside of even the furthest classroom that this school has to offer. I cringe. It is not so easy to be defiant when your parent comes out and uses your full name against you. My feet practically stop moving on their own accord.

"What?"

I sound exasperated and exhausted by the same old discussion. The only thing that is left to do is move on, to forget that any of this ever even happened; no grounding, no threat of suspension, certainly no glee club. One mistake in all of my seventeen years, and everybody wants to dangle it over my head like bait.

"You better watch how you talk to me right now, Santana." She points a firm finger in my face. The hallways are empty, but still, I find my eyes darting from left to right to see if anybody can see me getting scolded by my mother in public. If the glee club didn't ruin me, this certainly would. "What is going on with you, Santana?" She finally builds up the courage to ask me the question that has been on her mind for days now.

Walking closer towards me, her eyebrows duck with concern, her eyes scanning as though a built-in x-ray machine is housed somewhere inside of her brain and she is trying to use it on me to discover what it is that I am thinking. She has her theories, this I already know; that my behavior is me rebelling against her moving out here, or that it is me reacting to my father's death... But she does not know any of this for certain, she doesn't know me well enough to decide these kinds of things for herself.

Then again, not even I am entirely certain where my behavior is coming from these days.

"Nothing is going on with me!" I turn to face her, throwing my arms in defeat. I am meant to look exasperated, but by the time I actually do it, I feel as though I only resemble a toddler throwing a temper tantrum. I fall, defeated. I am sick and tired of people thinking that my behavior is resemblant of anything other than me simply wanting to have some friends for a change.

"Santana..." Her face softens, her eyes looking up to meet mine. We have the exact same eyes, me and my mother. The rest of me comes straight from my dad, but not my eyes. Those were all her own. "It's just... throwing parties, getting into fights... This isn't like you, Santana."

I sink. For a second, I think that maybe her plan had worked and I had allowed her to get inside of me. The reminder that she knows absolutely nothing about her own daughter however, makes my blood boil with rage all over again.

"How would you know!?" I yell. "You are so busy stuck inside your own little fairy tale world – with your dream job you spend day in and day out at, or your weird, mysterious boyfriend – that you don't even know your own daughters anymore! What, did you forget that the last three months even happened? Did you forget about me and Rachel? Did you forget about Dad?"

I explode. This is three months of pent-up anger and raw emotions, not towards my mother in particular, but towards my entire life. It is finally coming together; one final, epic explosion that releases itself to the public, straight across the fragile walls of William McKinley High School.

My mother stumbles backwards. She looks so taken aback by what I have just accused her of that she cannot seem to so much as string together a series of words comprehensible enough to form a complete sentence. Even I am a little thrown off by everything that I have just yelled in my fleeting fit of rage.

"Santana..."

It is Rachel that speaks first; a soft, warning tone, a quiet motion of disbelief and shock towards what I just said. I realize then that my outburst has only just reinforced everything that my mother has just said about me in the first place. I was growing defensive, because it was entirely the truth.

"Santana... I... I..."

"Save it." When she finally does manage to speak, something more than an incomprehensible jumble, I quiet her just as quickly, turning on my heels so that my back is facing her.

I storm down the hallway in such a dramatic fashion, you might think that I was Rachel; after all, she was the drama queen of our family. She was typically the one designated for the theatrics. But today, that roll has been taken on by myself. I was angry and I was determined to find some time to myself in order to relish on this sudden realization that I have finally come to; the realization that we are all just a mere piece of this giant, crappy puzzle that we call life, and once you find your place in that line, if you don't like it, well then you best suck it up and get used to it because that is the one and only place that you will ever fit.

And it is going to be exactly where it is that you are going to stay.

* * *

Noah is the one that actually manages to find me.

It is about half an hour after I'd stormed out on my mother and sister. I am sitting in the corridor outside of the senior parking lot where all of the kids sneak off to smoke cigarettes because it is secluded and hidden from the nosy eyes of teachers so that they know they won't get yelled at or given a lecture about how bad smoking is for you.

I have paid the utmost attention in every health class I have ever attended since the fourth grade, but still, I bum a smoke off of some goth kid who is wearing a dark purple cape and eyeliner, who laughed at me when I had even made the suggestion that I am a regular smoker.

I held the cigarette firmly between my clamped lips as I marched to the other side of the court yard and sat against the uncomfortable, stone bench. Only then had I realized that I didn't even know what side _needed_ to be lit, let alone the idea that I never carry a lighter with me.

In the end, I had simply just thrown the small, white stick un-lit and un-smoked into the dying flower bushes beside me. Maybe that was for the best. I didn't need to develop yet _another_ bad habit this week.

I feel his presence before he actually announces it to me.

Noah moves slowly, circling like a hawk before finally, he swoops down onto the bench besides me, being sure to take his time leaning forward and digging his elbows carefully into his knees. He clamps his hands together, making one big ball out of his fists and rests his chin against it, blinking a couple of times, staring ahead at absolutely nothing.

"So..." He finally breathes. "Glee club, huh?"

I sigh and shake my head back and forth. I can tell by the tone in his voice that he is trying to make light of the entire situation, but I am so mortified by the whole thing that I cannot bring myself to feel anything other than guilt.

"I am so sorry, Noah."

"You worry too much, Santana." He shakes it off with an ease that I wish I could mimic. "I've been in trouble at this shcool a hell of a lot more times than this. This is just about the easiest punishment that I have ever gotten. Besides, maybe it will be fun."

At this last comment, I actually look over towards him, cocking an eyebrow. Noah Puckerman trying to tell me that the glee club might be something that he would actually enjoy, is more shocking than it would be if he'd told me that his dog had learned how to stand up and walk on its hind legs last night.

He takes one good look at the expression on my face, and to my utmost surprise, he starts to laugh.

"I tried." He shrugs, but after a while he is laughing so hard that his entire body is shaking. But even that fades into the distance eventually, and before I know it, we are both silent once more.

For a couple of minutes, we just sit like this; staring straight ahead, neither looking at anything in particular. Finally, he breaks this by reaching down and grabbing onto my hand, squeezing gently before rubbing his thumb up and down the contour of my wrist until I am almost hypnotized by the movement.

"We'll make the best of this, okay?" He assures me. "Come on, lets look on the bright side. We... get to spend more time with one another. And after we get thrown in the dumpster or have Slushees poured over our heads, we can clean each other off." He gives me that sly, crooked half of a smile. The one that has trouble written all over it. His eyebrows raise and lower strategically, his eyes narrowing so I just know that whatever he is thinking about is incredibly dirty.

My ears turn red and I fluff instinctively. My first thought is that now might be a good time to tell him that not only am I a virgin, him kissing me the other night was the first real, actual kiss that I have ever received in my entire life. I shy away from that idea, however. I feel as though I am already treading on hot water in our relationship. There is no reason to put any more distance between the two of us.

"You mean... you really still wanna be with me after everything that I put you through?"

"Are you kidding me?" He throws his head back and laughs – loud and genuine – in response to what I think is the absolute most childish and desperate bid for attention that I have ever begged to receive. The entire thing makes me cringe. "You know that you're the first girl that I have ever been with that has ever been able to keep up with me, right?"

I look up at him with surprise for but a moment. The look of disbelief slowly washes off of my face. I know that I shouldn't be so shocked seeing as lately, I have been moving so quickly that i can barely keep up with even myself. This new lifestyle, it was faced-paced, it was fueled with pure adrenaline. Now, I wasn't quite the expert on it all like Noah was – _yet_ – but this was the speed that he's spent his whole life moving, I expect that it will take a little while for me to catch up.

The idea alone is exhausting.

"I'm a bad ass, Santana. I need somebody my equal to compliment me and right now, you may even be passing me on the rebellion scale. It's impressive. But this punishment, nah, this is nothin'." He waves the whole thing off as nothing more than a tiny blip in his already extensive record of misconduct. "I've been suspended from this school loads of times for fighting _and_ partying; one time even for lighting the school dumpster on fire..." His face softens suddenly, his eyes gentle as he wraps a strong arm around my shoulders and pulls me in closer to his muscular body. "But seriously, Santana don't worry yourself too much about all of this, okay? Everything is going to be just fine."

"Thank you, Noah." I breathe. He leans forward and I meet him half way. When he kisses me, it is like it is the first time all over again. I would stay like this all day if only I could, but I pull away eventually because I know that I have to.

"I should probably get back to class before I get into even more trouble."

"Class?" He questions this notion as though it is the most obscure idea that he has ever heard of. I watch as Noah glances down at his wrist, as though to check his watch for the time, although when I look, there is nothing there. "By my calculations, class is already just about over, anyway." The truth is that second period is just barely starting. I had heard the bell ring, shrill and loud across the entirey school not five minutes ago. "Why end our rebellious streak now?"

Noah stands and stretches briefly as though he has been sitting for hours rather than minutes before he reaches down and extends his hand over towards me, his hips bent at a slight bow as though to prove that he is more of a gentleman than anybody at this school could have ever imagined. I giggle like a twelve year old being asked out on her first date. Even I am not entirely sure where this gesture is coming from, but I accept the offer and place my hand daintily inside of his own so that he can lift me onto my own two feet.

Suddenly, Noah poses more a resemblance to Clark Gable than he does to the most bad ass student to ever grace William McKinley High School. Who ever would have thought?

"Come on." He tells me. "I'll take you to Breadstix for lunch."

* * *

By the time it is actually lunch, and my first rehearsal with the glee club is looming ominously over my head, my day has actually managed to improve slightly from the nosedive that it had taken earlier this morning. That is, of course, until I find myself walking towards the choir room, my shoulders hunched with nerves, flanked by the rest of the Cheerios and the football stars that I have trapped inside of this god-awful situation right alongside me.

We float nervous down the corridor of the arts wing. It strikes me suddenly, that I have never been down this side of the school before. Here, I am not Santana Corcoran, Cheerio. Instead, I am Santana Corcoran, fresh meat.

This place, well, it was _their_ territory; a safe haven for all of the band geeks and the art kids and the glee club to escape the slushee facials and the jabs into lockers and the hurtful words.

Suddenly, it was us that had to watch our backs, not them.

"Um... Mr. Schuester?"

I am the one to knock hesitantly against the open choir room door, because as the one that has gotten us all into this mess, I have been silently designated as the ring leader of this group of delinquents, the one in charge of all of the dirty work.

The older man turns towards the door in response to me calling his name, his face immediately brightening as though he had just won the lottery, rather than a mere group of unwilling accomplices forced to show up and help aid his glee club to victory.

"Come in, come in!" He waves us into the choir room enthusiastically, but we push forward without quite the same zeal.

The seven of us walk close together in a perfectly straight line, eyes focused anywhere but on the staggered rows of chairs that display the pathetic numbers that the glee club has managed to accumulate voluntarily – six.

"You guys, hey listen up real quick!"

There is a surprising volume to the choir room, despite its lack of occupants. They silence quickly, looking up towards their faithful leader par to his request. The second that they see who it is that is filed in a row behind him, they fall silent. Their smiles fade. They look surprised which in turn, surprises me. I thought Rachel would have told them all by now.

"What are _they_ doing here?"

I only vaguely recognize the girl who speaks with a hint of venom against her tongue. Rachel told me what her name was, but suddenly I couldn't remember. Was it Cadillac? Ferrari? I knew a lot about her, except apparently, her name. I had heard Brittany and Quinn poking fun of her in the cafeteria just the other day as they reminisced about a time last year when she had tried out for the Cheerios only to be rejected by Sue Sylvester, who'd not-so-kindly informed her that she housed a big attitude and an even bigger body to boot.

That hardly mattered however, because according to Rachel, none of her faults could even come close to touching the enormous voice that she housed underneath the surface.

"Now listen, Mercedes." _Mercedes_. Her name clicks into my head but a moment too late. _That was it._ "These are your new teammates from here on out, and you will treat them as such."

Mr. Schuester takes a step forward so that he is directly centered, like a protectve barrier, between the true glee kids and the fakes. I sneak a glance to my friends, all standing uncomfortably at my side trying to judge their expressions and predict what it is that they are currently thinking. They seem distressed, bitter in that they feel remarkably out of place, probably – I realize – for the first time in their entire lives.

I wonder if it will make any difference, now that they know how it feels to not belong.

Probably not.

"Hell to the no, Mr. Schue!"

"Come on you guys, we need them! Please remember that Sectionals is this Saturday and without them, we hardly have the numbers that we need to perform!" Rachel speaks in our defense. She may have only been here a week, but she displays a stunning confidence among the club. It is clear they perceive her, a leader. I can already tell that it will be Rachel, in charge of mediating between the two groups, so starkly different from one another.

This is what Rachel was passionate about, and she would be damned to allow something as stupid as a measly six people stop her from achieving her dream.

"I know that you're new around here, Rachel, but please note that these are the guys who dedicate half their lives to strategically plan the most opportune moment to throw slushies in our faces." Mercedes argues with my sister, although Rachel can only cross her arms in a huff as though she doesn't want to hear what she knows is the truth, regarding her sister and her new-found friends.

But Mercedes _does_ have a point. Rachel, she doesn't know what these people – what _we_ are capable of. She has only been a part of William McKinley's strict social hierarchy a week, and the worse battle scar she has to show is a single slushee attack executed by one Quinn Fabray. In Rachel's mind, Quinn was the only enemy to speak of, but for the rest of these guys, they have been tormented by each and every one of the very people now standing directly before them since elementary school.

It is difficult to defend ourselves against their reservations.

"I'm going to have to agree with Mercedes on this one, Mr. Schue." It is the boy in the wheelchair, the one from Friday's football game, that seconds Mercedes' motion. I immediately flash back to the image of him being doused with a cooler full of Gatorade, and can't say that I'm surprised. "Just last week, Finn and Puck locked me in a Port-a-John and tipped it, now they want to be a part of the glee club? I'm sorry, but I can't help but to suspect ulterior motives."

"Um... do you think that maybe I could say something?"

I sound nervous and speak without even realizing that I am talking. Even I am surprised by the tone of my own voice.

"Sure you can. Go ahead, Santana." Mr. Schuester waves me to the center of the classroom, so that everybody – the glee club _and_ the popular kids alike – can hear what it is that I have to say, but my feet are glued to the ground where I stand and I remain, firmly planted a safe distance away.

I cough slightly and fiddle with my hands. My throat feels suddenly scratchy and dry, like I wouldn't be able to get a word out even if I tried. I dry my damp palms against the cotton fabric of my Cheerios skirt. Even I am anticipating finding out what the hell it is I am going to say.

"Listen, I know that the Cheerios and the football team aren't exactly on the same wavelength as the glee club." I make my careful introduction, stating not an assumption but a fact. I try to ignore the sounds of scoffing coming from those standing directly across from me, but I can't and it makes me cringe.

Is this what it feels like to be in _their_ shoes? To walk into school every day, feeling not like a teenager, but like prey. I realize now that I have been spoiled with the ease by which I have found myself making friends in this new town. In the bliss of popularity, I seem to have forgotten that they had been me not so long ago.

I have never felt like more of a hypocrite in my entire life.

"All my sister has been talking about these last couple of days is how much this club means to her; how much all of you mean to her. Okay, so maybe it's not the Cheerios or the football team, maybe it won't bring you popularity or glory or anything more than a couple of slushies thrown in your faces on a daily basis, but what you guys have here, well it's special. And I woudl be honored to be a part of it."

I exhale heavily; a breath that I had not even realized that I had been holding and fade into silence. Short and sweet. My eyes lock with Rachel's. I still feel badly for the way that I treated both her and my mother earlier this morning; an idea that seems to be a growing habit with me lately, but she still gives me a soft smile and nods her head approvingly. Rachel always did have a way of saving my ass, although as the big sister I knew that that was _my_ job, not hers. She has given me so much support, not only in these last few weeks, but in, well – _forever_. I turn away from her, suddenly mortified that I have done nothing but throw this generosity right back in her face. Maybe this was the universe's way of telling me that there was still an opportunity for me to change.

"Well, we can't argue with that logic. Alright you guys, welcome to the New Directions." Mr. Schuester claps his hands firmly together as though this finalizes everything; as though now that I have spoken a hand full of sweet words, we can all move forward holding hands and singing Kumbaya all the way to Nationals.

"Let's get started, shall we?"

* * *

In a bizarre, unexpected twist of events, glee rehearsal had not only been a success, it had been – and I will deny this if anybody ever tries to quote me on it – _fun_.

We blended well together, the thirteen of us; a compilation of the most unsuspecting partners you could ever imagine; theater nerds and glee kids singing and dancing alongside cheerleaders and football stars. Much to everybody's surprise, we had actually managed to quickly make a fully functional, potentially award-winning glee club.

I had watched with pride as Rachel took a firm direction, speaking a step-by-step plan for Sectionals on Saturday until she was blue in the face.

Our set list was already nearly complete – according to Rachel – with two of the three needed numbers already designated and hashed out. Conveniently, _we_ only needed to be a part of two of the three numbers. The first would be a solo; a ballad that Rachel had already picked out and hand-crafted for herself. I couldn't say that I had been surprised when Rachel had announced her choice of songs. After all, she has been singing _Don't Rain on My Parade_ since she was old enough to talk.

The second number would require more of a group effort. But Queen's _Somebody to Love_ was, as Mr. Schuester described, a "fan favorite" and all of us already knew most of the words to it already anyway. The only thing that was really left for us to do was to polish up the harmonies as well as the dance steps.

Even the rough version that we had rehearsed earlier today however, had sounded pretty damn good.

No, I had know from the very beginning that our problem spot would lie on the closer, the final song of the performance, the one that Quinn and I had been assigned to come up with; more notably, the one that Quinn and I had been assigned to come up with _together_.

Rachel has been offering to take on the role for herself all morning, claiming that she already had a few rough ideas sketched out. But I had denied her request almost immediately. This was _my_ punishment. These were _my _consequences and I had to face them... Of course, that did not stop Rachel from trying to add her two-cents into my decision at every opportunity she found. This was my sister that we were talking about after all.

Rachel was vibrant, she was passionate; a natural leader, my father always called her. It used to make me jealous. I wondered how it was possible that Rachel was born second, but still somehow managed to get stuck with all of the best qualities while I was left with none.

She has been pitching ideas to me at each passing glance all afternoon, rambling on until she was blue in the face. I have never seen her immerse herself so wholly inside of a single activity. Immediately, I had felt bad about being so judgmental regarding her decision to join the glee club in the first place. Clearly, this was in her heart.

Instead, it is Cheerio's practice later on that afternoon after school that sends everything straight to hell.

I take my usual spot in the line up. Quinn is front and center and I am directly to her right, with Brittany firm at my other side.

As it turns out, Coach Sylvester had not been lying earlier that morning when she'd told Quinn and I about her new practice plan, involving running stairs until our legs fell off. And although we didn't quite drive all the way down to Cincinnati to visit Paul Brown Stadium as she had promised, the bleachers on the football field worked just as well.

By the time we are back inside of the gym, the muscles of my thighs are so wobbly and unstable that I can barely even stand, let alone be expected to perform a flawless cheerleading routine.

Every move that I make is the wrong one. I spend the entire time half a beat behind, messing up on even the simplest of moves, the ones that I have perfected days ago – or so I thought.

"Corcoran!" It takes Coach Sylvester less than five seconds to pick up on all of my missteps, and before I know it, I am on her verbal shit list, being called out in front of all of my teammates over her bull horn. "Pull your head out of your ass before I come over there and do it for you!"

"Yes, Coach." I respond automatically. I am trying, really I am but the more people are paying attention to me, the more it seems I am messing up. I have done more than enough screwing up today. I am already on Coach Sylvester's bad side as it is. What if this is her final straw? What if today is finally the day that she has enough of me and kicks me off of the Cheerios? Then what will I have left, the glee club?

I break out into a nervous sweat that has absolutely nothing to do with the physical exertion I am putting up with. In fact, I am so nervous that the only thing that I can seem to think about is exactly just how nervous I am, just how badly I cannot afford to screw up today...

In turn, this makes me do nothing but screw up even more. Go figure.

I turn with the music, no surprise, half a beat before I am supposed to. The result; me walking head-on into the last person that I would ever want to – _Quinn_.

The blonde makes a loud, perhaps over-exaggerated _humph_ as I knock her off of her footing, effectively destroying her strict concentration. She stumbles backwards a couple of paces, bumping into the pyramid that is holding poor Katie Cashmere at the top. Luckily, her base manages to catch her beneath frantically scrambling hands before she can hit the hard, wooden floor below.

"How about you watch where the hell you're going for a change!" Quinn screams at me, her eyes red with anger and her voice only half drowned-out by Coach Sylvester's shrill whistle, which stops us dead in our tracks. She is rushing towards us – inevitably in order to yell at me – just as Quinn gives me a sharp push to get away from her. I stumble backwards into an immediate series of flashbacks of our fight on Friday night and have half the mind to push her right back and re-open fresh wounds all over again, but before I get the opportunity to, Coach Sylvester has already stepped between us.

"Don't even start." She warns, rotating a threatening finger between both my, and Quinn's faces. Around us, the rest of the team backs away slowly, trying to find a safe distance from the kill zone.

Coach Sylvester's eyes dart back and forth rapidly between Quinn and I. Only when she is confident that we are not going to try to kill one another, does her gaze finally settle in upon me.

"What the hell is going on with you today, Corcoran?" She yells in my face, her breath hot against my skin. Over her shoulder, I see Quinn Fabray fold her arms satisfied across her chest, a smug look written upon her face directed towards the idea that I am being yelled at for my failures.

"She must be too distracted with signing half of the Cheerios squad away to the glee club to actually concentrate on her own performance!" Quinn chimes in, enunciating every syllable so that immediately, the crowd of Cheerios surrounding us begins to whisper animatedly; soft at first, but gradually growing louder and louder.

If I had it my way, I would go through the rest of my life without anybody ever knowing anything about me being a member of the glee club. But Quinn, it seemed, had other plans, because although she _was_ technically a culprit as well, she was smart enough to know that everybody eventually finding out was inevitable.

Just so long as she pinned the blame entirely on me, her reputation would be safe.

I feel my fellow Cheerios staring a hole through the back of my head. Their glares burn a hole straight into my brains and make my face light up with shame. I haven't felt this self-conscious since I was back in Boston.

"That, Q sounds to me like a personal problem." Coach Sylvester turns towards her star with a tone that indicates that she is not interested in the glee club, nor how it affects any of our popularity, just so long as it doesn't tamper with the quality of her squad as it seems to have done thus far. "You need to take that up with your therapist. I don't care very much for personal problems. They make my stomach ulcers act up, and looking at your performance today makes me want to vomit enough as it is."

With that, she turns; a full one hundred and eighty degree rotation. Her steel blue eyes survey her Cheerios carefully. Suddenly, they fall very silent, wary of the fact that they are being carefully observed by the most feared cheerleading coach in the entirety of Ohio, maybe even in the entirety of the country.

"Hit the showers!" Coach Sylvester finally barks. We don't have to be told twice; her Cheerios scatter like cockroaches towards the direction of the locker room. "And if any of you come to practice tomorrow looking as crappy as you did today, we will do Indian Runs for so long that your parents will have already reported you as missing by the time you're done!"

"Hey, are you okay?"

I feel a gentle hand against my shoulder just as the last of the Cheerios disappears behind the locker room doors. Looking up, I see a pair of beautiful, blue eyes, deep with concern and the pain in my legs, the embarrassment of that dismal practice, it all disappears immediately directly underneath Brittany's gentle touch.

"Yeah." I sigh in my not-so-assuring assurance. "It's just been a long day, that's all."

The blonde smiles at me, but the concern does not leave her eyes. My heart can't help but to speed up a couple of notches. Brittany Pierce is worried about me.

I follow her inside of the locker room. By the time we get inside, there is already a commotion. Practice today has seemed to leave everybody on edge; stiff with tension and exhaustion... Quinn announcing to the entire world that me, her and Brittany were now members of the glee club certainly didn't help either.

"It's not like I signed _myself_ up for that stupid club!" The further I walk inside, the more distinct Quinn's voice becomes. "That freaking gremlin got in trouble, and she decided to take half the Cheerios _and_ the football team down with her!"

My blood is boiling. Quinn is trying to take all of the blame off of her own shoulders, and place it solely onto my own. I immediately feel its weight baring down on me, so heavy that it creates the illusion that my feet are sinking into the floor below me; linoleum converting into quick sand at the blink of an eye.

As my presence becomes more and more apparent inside of the locker room, the silence gradually starts to grow until it is so thick, I could cut it with a knife. All eyes slowly begin to fall onto me; one after the other after the other until thirty-somewhat pairs of eyes are baring down directly upon me. My muscles tense naturally. I am a wounded gazelle, barely standing upright in the middle of a circle of lionesses.

In a word, I was dead.

"So, you want to be a part of that little Fag Club now, huh?"

Lindsay Constigan was a senior with big aspirations for a cheerleading career that I quietly thought she should tone down a notch or two seeing as how she wasn't nearly as good as she thought. She possessed a bitter resentment towards the fact that Quinn Fabray had taken her spotlight as next runner-up for captain as a mere freshman, meaning that she never would get the opportunity to shine like she believed she deserved. When I came into the picture, her situation only got ten times worse. Lindsay was looking for any and every opportunity to shoot both Quinn and I down from our high-horses a notch or two. I could practically see the excitement swimming in her eyes that now, she had finally found her opportunity.

"It's not like any of us actually wanted to do it." I roll my eyes and push past her, stepping further inside of the locker room. My roommates part away from me like the Red Sea. It was as though being a member of glee was a fate contagious by contact and should they get too close, they would automatically poof into the choir room, right next to us. "It's part of our punishment for the party on Friday night. It was either that, or we get suspended so..."

My words drift into nothing as I approach my locker, my mouth suddenly too dry to so much as finish a sentence. Five minutes. They had entered this locker room no more than five minutes ahead of me and still, the entire Cheerios squad has still managed to slanderize the metal casing of my locker, the word _LOSER_ painted into it with bright red nail polish. It is still wet. It drips like blood, stray droplets plunging to the floor with a resounding _plunk_ that echoes like a gunshot amidst the silence.

My blood runs so cold that it leaves me frozen. I wouldn't even be able to run out of this locker room in tears if I had wanted to.

"Like that's an excuse!" Lindsay laughs at my reaction towards finding my locker, but it is not a comical laugh. Instead, it is a malicious sound that roars like thunder and sends an uncomfortable chill up my spine. "You three better find a way out of that social death trap before your position on the Cheerios becomes compromised. We cannot have our captain, or any of our other Cheerios representing us when they are spending half of their time singing and dancing with those social degenerates in the glee club!"

A murmur of agreement stems from the girls surrounding us. Quinn's hands are on her hips, her eyes narrowing in on Lindsay Constigan as though daring her to threaten her captaincy again. I find myself cheering Quinn on for the first time in my life, because it is nice to see her directing her rage on somebody other than me for a change. Besides, I couldn't say that I would mind seeing Lindsay Constigan become the fresh recipient to one of Quinn Fabray's hammer fists; a blow, that I can say from experience, is particularly effective.

The two of them stare each other down for seconds that feel like hours, but much to my disappointment, Quinn is the first to break eye contact. She merely scoffs and flips her ponytail dramatically over her shoulder. "Fine." She huffs. "I'm quitting the stupid glee club tomorrow anyway. Rehearsal today was just about the worst hour of my life."

And with that, she grabs a firm hold onto her gym bag and she storms out of the locker room, exaggerating the sway of her hips with every step that she takes.

I can hear the sound of her cheerleading shoes stomping against the tile floor all the way down the hallway.

The rest of the Cheerios stand their ground briefly, continuing to glare at Brittany and I. I am still standing in front of my vandalized locker like a fish out of water, but so typical of high school girls, the actual fighting is minimal. No, for them, all of the action will play out behind our backs.

I knew this drill, and I knew it well.

Slowly, the rest of them start to grab at their own gym bags before heading for the exit, brushing silently past us on the way out. Some bump our shoulders purposefully, others try to avoid contact all together. Finally, it is just Brittany and I once more.

"I'm so sorry, Britt." I finally manage only after I can no longer tolerate the heavy silence that everybody's absence leaves behind. The adrenaline is dying down from inside of my veins. Suddenly, I no longer feel as though my legs can support the rest of my body weight. I sink down against the wooden bench behind me and bury my face inside of my hands.

"Hey..." Brittany coos gently, with a voice so soft that I get to thinking that maybe the glee club really _is_ the perfect place for her to be.

She sits down beside me and wraps her arm across my shoulder blades, pulling my body into her own. The tears well up inside my eyes, but much to my approval they never actually fall, only stand stead-fast and heavy against the undersides of my eyelids.

"I'm an idiot!" I hiccup beneath a shaky breath. "I was being so stupid, and now it's going to cost you all of your friends. I should have never had that stupid party at my house. I should have never hit Quinn. I should have..."

"Stop that." Brittany's voice is sharp and articulate and it is strong enough that it stops me dead in my tracks. When I finally do muster up the courage to look her dead in the eyes, she is staring straight at me; a deep and meaningful expression written upon her face so that I can tell that everything that she is about to say to me, she means it; every word. "Those girls are morons, okay." My eyes widen, hearing Brittany talking about her friends like that. Normally, she is considered the ditzy one in the group; the girl that spends her days prancing about in her own magical world that exists solely inside of her own head. Now that she is hear before me, expressing an emotion other than positivity and happiness, I feel as though I am meeting her again for the very first time. "They're all so superficial, San. They don't care about anything or anybody but themselves. You, you're different from all of them. You're special."

I flush. I haven't been feeling very special as of late. In fact, these days I was feeling pretty damn superficial myself.

Would Brittany still like me even if she knew who the true me really was? Would Noah? Would anybody?

"You don't need the Cheerios to prove anything. Besides, I like glee. I had fun at rehearsal today." This catches my attention. I snap my head up, surprised to hear any of the group of people that I had dragged down to glee club that afternoon expressing a feeling regarding the activity that was anything other than serving their time. "It was a nice change, you know; to be around people that are doing something because they love to do it, not because they feel like they have to just to fit in. I think I'll stick with glee, even after our punishment is over."

"Can I tell you something?" I shift uncomfortably, my eyes turning away from hers as she offers me a soft _mhm_ in response to my inquiry. "I kind of liked glee today too."

I was being honest with Brittany for the first time, leaving me feeling suddenly so free. The truth was, I _had_ enjoyed glee reharsal. I had enjoyed the singing. I had enjoyed the dancing. I had enjoyed the opportunity to spend a little more time with my sister, seeing as how that was something that I never did at school anymore.

I liked that everybody in the glee club seemed to care about each other, support each other. I liked that they didn't seem like the kind of people that would go behind your back and try to destroy you the second that you started to stumble. Instead, I knew that they would be the first ones to pick me back up.

For one hour today at glee, I finally found that I was starting to feel like my old self again. It was about time. It has been much too long since I've felt that way.

"How do you do it, Britt?" I ask her suddenly, because I am so envious of her, and I can't be bothered to hide that fact any longer. I have never met a person so in-tuned with her sense of self, so comfortable with the idea of who they were; except of course for maybe Rachel. But Rachel was my little sister, and little sister's hardly counted in matters such as this.

"Do what?"

"Still manage to be you even when you are friends with all of these guys." I hadn't meant to sound judgmental when I said _all of these guys_ but that is the way that it comes out. I am relieved when Brittany only laughs. Looking down, I watch as she plays with her hands for a couple of seconds, choosing her words carefully before looking back up at me. She smiles, but at the same time, there is a sadness of longing deep inside of her eyes. A sadness that makes my heart break with the sudden desire to wash it all away.

"Most people think I'm an idiot."

"I don't." I say this so quickly that I am afraid it makes me sound almost desperate.

"I know." Her smile doesn't falter once. "But most people do. Most of the time I just spend all of my time inside of my own head. It's nicer in there. I think that's why everybody thinks that I'm such a moron."

"Because you just have your own about things?"

"Most of us do, don't we?"

I allow her words to sink deep inside of me. They are strong, meaningful. They teem with a wisdom that reaches much beyond her years. She places a hand down against my knee and pats it gently causing me to shiver before she uses my body as leverage to push herself up into a standing position.

"Come on." She offers me her hand in order to pull me up as well. I accept her offer and we lock eyes. There is a distinct sparkle behind those blue irises, and as I latch onto her hand and allow for her to pull me to my feet, she decides to let me go only after giving my hand one last, firm squeeze of reassurance.

I shudder at the loss of contact, but still follow her from the locker room, grateful to know that she will always be somebody that I have to pick me up whenever I fell down. Sure, I may not have anything close to a semblance of an idea as to the direction that my life was going anymore; hell, I have never felt so lost in my entire life, but at the same time, I don't think that I have ever felt so found either.

And for right now, that was more than good enough for me.


	7. On the Surface

**Hey guys I'm back. Once again, sorry for being an asshole and making you all wait, I've been busy at work such is life. All I want to do is write and all they want to do is keep me slaving. Anyway, once again sorry for the wait. Next week in theory, should be a little bit calmer for me but I guess we'll just have to wait and see. **

**You guys all keep me going thanks for all the support. It is eternally appreciated! **

* * *

**Chapter 7**** –** On the Surface

I get home much later than I had initially anticipated.

After the disaster that had been Cheerios practice earlier this afternoon, I had decided that I needed a place to go to relax, to wind down a little... In a remarkable turn of events, I had traded in the gym and the cheerleading, and instead found my feet carrying me instinctively towards the choir room; the exact place that I have spent the last week of my William McKinley career trying to avoid at any and all costs.

The small room was empty, it being much too late for anybody aside from the janitors to still be lingering on this wing of the high school.

Quickly, I learn that I prefer it this way.

I guess that while my mother had made a name for herself performing in front of sold-out crowds, and while my little sister was increasingly eager to follow in her footsteps, I in turn had learned to embrace solidarity. I was like my father in that way, or so I have been told.

What had started as me succumbing to my curiosity regarding what lies within these old, choir-room walls, had quickly developed into hours of thumbing through old binders full of sheet music. Eventually, I had grown so bold as to start pulling some of the old leaflets from their binders, book-marking them as potential ideas for the performance that the New Directions still needed in order to complete their Sectionals repertoire for this coming Saturday...

Before I had even realized how much time had passed, it was already dark outside. I was a little bit surprised that nobody had called looking for me until I remembered that my mother had taken my cell phone away days ago; a stipulation of my grounding... So with no possible means to call for a ride, I had ended up walking home; a roughly two mile journey that I thought might be a good way for me to clear my head, anyway.

I journeyed up the side of the road at a leisurely pace, Cheerios skirt swaying in the breeze, sheet music clutched firmly inside of my right hand.

While this whole glee thing had started only with the intentions of serving as a punishment, it suddenly wasn't feeling much like one.

But then again, that may only be because Quinn hadn't been there with me tonight, as Mr. Schuester had intented when he'd assigned us the task of choosing our final song for Sectionals, _together_.

"You're home late."

I slip through the front door quietly, not really expecting anybody inside to still be awake. I am surprised when Rachel comments immediately on my tardiness, calling to me from her position stretched out against the couch, remote control in hand as she flips aimlessly through the stations on the television. Rachel is not much for either lazing around, _or_ for television. In fact, usually by this time of the night, she is already well into her hours-long bedtime rituals, which includes gulping down obscene amounts of green tea and running vocal scales until even the animals outside are screeching for her to quiet down.

My mother in turn, is nowhere to be seen. I assume that she is still at work. She has been pulling a lot of late nights lately. Usually, Rachel and I are already fast asleep by the time she gets home, and just barely waking up to get ready for school when she leaves. It sucks, not to have her around, especially with so much change lingering around us as of late. Besides, her schedule is enough to exhaust even _me_, I mean, we are talking about a woman who couldn't even bring herself to drag her old bones out of bed a couple of weeks ago...

Silently, to myself, I wonder how she does it.

"Yeah," I respond to Rachel's implied nosiness, walking towards the couch and plopping my full weight down on top of her feet, waving the collection of sheet music I had spent all night gathering in front of her face as though to prove that me being late came with a legitimate excuse, seeing as how I was grounded and all. "I figured I'd get a head start on trying to find that last song that we need for Sectionals. Wanna see some of the ideas I came up with?"

"Nah." She breathes, and I shrink in my surprise towards her unexpected response. Normally, with something that Rachel was so passionate about, such as the glee club, she would be all over this, eager to throw her input into my suggestions.

"Maybe later." I sink, feeling suddenly dejected. To think, that maybe Rachel and I being a part of glee together, having the opportunity to have something in common again within this music would actually bring some enthusiasm and excitement into our lives... To be shot down by her hurts.

To be reminded of how awfully I have been treating not only Rachel, but my mother as well in this last week hurts only more.

"Mom was looking for you before, by the way." She speaks, allowing me to interpret what has distracted her brain, so normally focused on one thing and one thing only – the music. This makes sense, and her news interests me.

"Mom's home?" I ask, not entirely sure if I'm more surprised by the fact that she is actually home for a change, or the fact that she actually wants to speak to me, to _look_ at me still after the way I'd treated her this morning – hell, the way I'd treated her all week.

"Mhm." Rachel nods. "She got home from work about an hour ago. She still seems pretty upset about everything that happened this morning." I frown, my brows furrowing with concern. This sounds like an accusation. I feel like I owe Rachel an explanation and concentrate very hard on my breathing for a couple of seconds, trying to decide what I can say, what I can do to make this better.

The sad truth is, I really don't think that there is much that I can do.

"Listen, I was pissed off this morning." I try for something, but to start on this note somehow only makes the entire thing sound even worse. "I was angry, mostly at myself and I took it out on you and I took it out on mom. I'm sorry."

"It's okay." Rachel mumbles.

"No it's not." I sit up a little bit straighter, looking her dead in the eye so that she knows that it is okay to not be able to forgive me right away, for the way that I have been throwing her aside. I wonder what it must feel like, to be betrayed by your most trusted companion when you know that you need her the most, and realize that it must not feel good.

As if I wasn't already feeling guilty enough.

"A lot has changed these last couple of months, hasn't it?" Rachel breathes. Her eyes somehow deepen, glistening with an overwhelming indication that she is trying so desperately to understand the entire alignment of the universe all at once.

"Yeah." I agree with her, not bothering to inform her that she shouldn't try so hard to witness the impossible, that sometimes the Earth just spins much faster than any of us can actually keep up with. I do this because some things, you just have to figure out for yourself. "Yeah, I guess that it has."

"It's weird. Most days, I feel like I am moving so quickly and meanwhile, everybody around me are all staying exactly the same."

Her words resonate inside of me. I look deep into her rich, brown eyes, trying to understand her from the inside out, and in turn, she does the same to me. Rachel has the expression of an old soul, giving off the impression that she has already lived a thousand years, and has stored a thousand stories waiting to be told. I see that feature every single time I look at her; the amazing woman that I just know she is one day going to grow up to be. "I feel like when it was just us – all four of us – it seems like a lifetime ago now, doesn't it?"

"I guess it does."

"Are you gonna be okay, San?" Her voice is dream-like and airy. It sounds more like she is trying to talk to herself, rather than to me. Maybe she was trying to make an analogy towards how blatantly odd and distant _I_ have been with her lately, but for some reason I don't think that this is the case, and suddenly, I find myself wondering even more so what the hell is going on inside of that incredible head of hers at any given hour of the day.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean... You've just been acting so... so different lately." She chooses her words carefully, trying to pick the most polite means of telling me that I was acting like a lunatic. I applaud her tact, but sometimes it is just easier to hear the truth out-right rather than to be skirted around until it's too late. "I've been doing some research online. I learned that after something traumatic happens to a person – say, losing a parent – they can become withdrawn, or they can even experience an entire shift in their personalities, trying to be somebody that they're not to help cope."

"Rachel..." I try to stop her because today, I am not feeling within the realm of my emotional stability to hear about my coping mechanisms... Maybe she is right. Maybe this is my means of venting against an inability to grieve in the weeks following my father's death because I was too busy taking care of my mother. Maybe this is my suppressed emotions finally swelling to bursting point. I just did not want to hear it being theorized out loud. I have been avoiding it for nearly three months now.

What's a little bit longer, right?

"I've just... I've never really seen this side of you before, Santana." She concludes in a manner that lets me know that she has been practicing exactly what she has been planning on saying to me all night long. "I'm worried, that's all."

"I know you are, Rach." I sigh; I am not stupid enough to believe that there is any point of trying to convince her to drop this all together, but at the same time, I refuse to succumb to the intervention. "I don't know what it is about this town that's got me so backwards, but I do know that we're better than the whole lot of them." I force a smile, trying to get her to reciprocate, offering her a playful nudge on the shoulder. "You think you can teach me how to be indifferent again? I seem to have forgotten."

"You're smarter than half the people at that school, Santana. You don't need me to help you."

The smile remains lingering upon my face, but it fades into something much softer, sadder. I can't seem to find the words that I need to remind her that I will always need her, no matter what.

"Well then when did you get so smarter than me, huh?"

"I've always been smarter than you." Rachel rolls her eyes, but through the shifty looks, she glances nervously up towards me as if to ensure that I have picked up on the fact that she had only been joking. That was the best part about my little sister; her heart was so big that she couldn't even _pretend_ to make fun of you.

"Touche."

This time, I actually do manage a laugh; hearty and genuine. She had such a kind soul, Rachel; it was unique and genuine, generosity smothered beneath fierce determination. It made my heart physically ache to think that there were people out there who wanted to do nothing but hurt her.

"Get some sleep, okay Rachel?" I tell her, jerking my head towards the hallway leading towards our bedroom because it is getting late, and the last thing that either of us need is to stay awake all night in front of the television. "Tomorrow will be another day."

"Okay." She nods softly and stretches her arms high above her head through an overly exaggerated yawn. When she lowers her arms, she uses this motion to propel herself into a standing position, punching at the power button to silence the glowing television before following my lead down the hallway and towards our separate bedrooms.

I pause, stopping suddenly at the first door.

My bedroom is further down, situated at the end of the hall, Rachel's directly beside mine. But first, I had something that I had to do; something that had had a lot to do with the guilt that has been gradually creeping up the length of my spine for a couple of days now, combined with a sudden desire to achieve absolution for being quite possibly, the world's worst daughter alive.

"Aren't you going to bed, San?" Rachel senses my hesitation, turning from within the doorway of her own bedroom, confused to find me lingering uncomfortably outside of my mother's closed door.

"In a minute." I assure her, shooing her on as though to tell her not to wait up for me. "Go ahead, I'll catch up. I need to do something first."

"Okay," Rachel nods her head in a motion of understanding, eyeing our mother's closed bedroom door, leaving me with the impression that she knows exactly what my intentions are. Her lips purse with approval, but she leaves it at that. "Goodnight, San."

"Night, Rachel." I mimic. "Love you."

"Love you too." She smiles softly and closes her bedroom door quietly behind her. For a long time, it is just me alone inside of this darkened hallway, framed by a closed door that suddenly seems to be towering over me with intimidation all of a sudden.

It takes me a couple of extra seconds to actually motivate myself enough to grab onto the doorknob and twist. When I finally do open the door, I do so just a crack, knocking softly with my free hand in order to give my mother the courtesy of forewarning her of my presence.

The inside of the room is dimly lit, the sound of show tunes whispering softly from the speakers of her computer; research to contribute to Vocal Adrenaline's bid for Regionals no doubt. I think of my own sheet music collection, piled high against the coffee table in the living room and I can't help but to relish on how nice it is to feel as though I actually have something in common with my mother for a change.

"Mom?"

I call out blindly into the room because I cannot seem to catch a glimpse of her through the minuscule crack that I've created inside of the door. Hell, for all I know, she isn't even here.

Opening the door a little bit wider, I finally manage to spot my mother sitting behind her desk, her hair pulled back into a sloppy bun, adorning an over-sized pair of sweat pants that doubles to her, as pajamas. She is wearing her thick, black-framed glasses as opposed to her usual contact lenses, a rarity for her. My mother was a very self-conscious person when it came to things like that. It throws me off my already unbalanced guard.

She pauses in her ministrations in response to me calling her name, half-way finished with writing something down against a piece of paper that is already crammed with little notes, what started off as a piece of plain, white computer paper grafittied with what looks like every single idea that has ever popped inside of her head in the entirety of her lifetime.

She looks up at me curiously, placing her full attention onto me, putting her pen down against the desk and closing the lid of her lap top so that the music immediately silences.

She says nothing to either encourage or discourage my entrance into her room; in fact, she says absolutely nothing at all, leading me to believe that she is still pissed. I guess that I can't say that I really blame her much on that one, though. I take it upon myself to step further inside. I am feeling predominantly awkward, and this silence is not helping. One-on-one mother-daughter time was not something that my mother and I did very often, or well... ever.

"Um..." I stutter briefly because I am inexperienced and not really sure how to go about doing this. The words feel suddenly caught deep inside of the center of my throat and I find that I am having a hard time getting them out, until finally, they come together and seem to spew out all at once. "I just wanted to say... I needed to say that I'm sorry for everything that happened this weekend and for treating you the way that I did today. I guess... I guess that I just got a little bit carried away trying to make some friends at a new school. I know that it was stupid and that it wasn't fair to either you or to Rachel and... and I'm just sorry, that's all."

I get all of this out in one, single breath so that by the time that I am done speaking, I am left practically gasping for air. I watch my mother carefully as she sighs heavily and takes her time absorbing my words, analyzing the apology in trying to authenticate it, or else debunk it as me simply trying to suck up to her enough for her to feel bad and cut my grounding by a couple of days.

Or weeks.

She studies me carefully, taking off her glasses in order to size me up and down although I know that the motion is all for effect, she is completely blind without her glasses. With an icy revelation, I can't help but wonder whether or not she took them off simply because she doesn't _want_ to see the girl that she suddenly can't even recognize as having come from her own body anymore.

"Thank you, Santana." She finally breathes after a lengthy evaluation, ultimately deciding that my intentions have been truly genuine. "I appreciate that. Really, I do."

"This morning, I was just... I was angry at myself for what I did and I took it out on you." I rant because although she thanked me for at least being brave enough to come to her and apologize, she has yet to accept my sincerest offering or remorse, leaving me kind of nervous with the idea that she may never trust me again for as long as I were to live. "It wasn't fair to you. None of it was."

"No, I suppose that it wasn't." She sighs, shaking her head as she hooks her glasses back behind her ears. She takes her time. The care that she is placing behind each and every one of her movements leaves me nervous. "Nothing seems very fair these days, does it?"

This last bit comes out with the air that she is saying something that she had been thinking, but never actually intended to come out. I raise a curious eyebrow. This was a sentiment very unlike my mother.

"Sit, San." She finally says after some very careful thought, patting at the corner of her mattress.

I accept her invitation gratefully, partially because my world has been tilting so heavily on its axis lately that I am finding it difficult to stand up for too long without growing intolerably dizzy, and partly because I am so desperate for my mother's assurance at the moment, that the reminder that she wouldn't be so quick to throw me to the side serves as a relief. "Listen, I know that things haven't exactly been easy on us lately I should have known that all of this craziness was bound to catch up with us eventually... And Santana, please believe me when I tell you that I know that you are hurting but acting out like this, it's not the way that you want to get caught coping. I know that you are a teenager and that it's hard enough as it is trying to readjust to a new school, and a new neighborhood, and new friends all while trying to figure out who you are as a person and who you want to be, but acting like this; fighting, partying, _drinking_, it isn't you, and it sure as hell is not a healthy outlet for you to deal with whatever it is that you are feeling right now."

"I know." I tell her, because this is a revelation that I _was_ slowly starting to come to on my own accord. Besides, my mother had already taught me everything that I needed to know about the difference between a healthy outlet and a dangerous one. She had practically written the book on self-destruction, after all.

As an expert, I trust her judgment.

"I'll try my best to start changing things around here too, deal?"

"Deal." I nod my head firmly in my agreement, watching as she smiles at me softly before reaching up a hand to gently cup my cheek. At her contact, I find that I physically shudder because never once before this have I ever realized just how healing my mother's touch could actually be. It was nice, the ability to feel so close to her. I just wish that it were something that we could do more often.

"We have to start thinking more in terms of ourselves, of us as a family." There it is, that distant tone once more, but I am distracted; her thumb rubs soft, soothing circles into my jaw. I lean so far into her touch that I practically fall off of the mattress. "Me, you _and_ Rachel... Tá gach rud Teaghlaigh, right?"

She drops her hand and I snap my eyes open, smiling at the old phrase that I haven't heard in so long, the one that my dad used to say all of the time. It was an old family saying, Irish for _Family is Everything_.

"Tá gach rud teaghlaigh." I mimic before suddenly, I shrink again, because I still have this thought lingering in the back of my mind that requires an answer and I am a little bit embarrassed to ask it.

"Mom?" I ask, watching as her face glances up towards my own, providing me with her full attention.

"Mhm?"

"Are you still mad at me?"

She leans back inside of her chair, placing a closed fist against the underside of her chin as though in deep thought. I find myself holding my breath waiting for her answer.

"I'm not mad." She finally settles. I exhale the air that I have been holding painfully inside of my lungs in my relief, but my mother is quick to hold up a firm, silencing finger in order to allow me to know that she is not finished with me just yet. I suck that breath right back in once more. "Mostly I'm just disappointed."

"Oh..." I deflate because sometimes, disappointment is even worse than anger is.

"Listen San, I get it. Really, I do." She tries to assure me of this, but it does not sound like she has been able to wrap her head around the half of it. "But there's a lot of different ways to vent your frustrations aside from throwing parties and getting into fights... Maybe that's why I think that this whole thing with the glee club will be good for you. I heard you talking to Rachel out there, it sounds like you're starting to like it already." She smiles up at me, seemingly pleased that the gift of music has struck the genetic code of both of her progeny as opposed to only Rachel. "I'm not mad at you... anymore. But at the same time, I don't want to get another phone call from your principal, or – unless you want to give an aneurysm – from the police ever again."

"Okay." I make the promise that for once, I have absolutely no intention on breaking.

"Things are going to start changing around here." She speaks with an airy sing-song behind her voice so that she mostly sounds as though she is talking only to herself.

"Change like how?" I ask despite myself.

"You'll see." Is all she says, leaving an astonishingly mysterious mood filtering through the air.

"You'll see."

* * *

The next morning, I am awake before even the sun.

I have a busy day ahead of me and am determined to get a kick-start on the promise that I had made just last night to both Rachel, as well as my mother to start turning things around inside of this house as quickly as humanly possible.

With only five days left until Saturday's Sectionals performance, I find myself marching towards Quinn Fabray's house before I even have time to tell myself that this is a bad idea. I stride determined, clutching at the handful of sheet music that I had chosen from only last night. I don't even know if Quinn and her family will be awake at this crack-of-dawn hour, but I will be damned if I do not make good on the assignment that has been placed upon Quinn and my shoulder's originally as a punishment. The assignment that I was actually finding myself starting to enjoy.

I decided this morning, that just so long as Quinn and I narrowed in on our song choice by today, then five days should be plenty of time to introduce the music to the rest of the club, to make sure the band knew what they were playing and to start working on choreography. The routine would be in place by this afternoon; but it would have to be down-pat by Saturday, and for seven of us, that meant learning three entire routines. We were hard-pressed for time. There was no other option aside from this morning for finalizing this song.

I had found Quinn's address from the phone directory that the school had provided my mother with on the day of our orientation. She lived, as I'd expected she would, all the way on the other side of town, clear from my neighborhood of Lima Heights. The walk was a bit much, but driving wasn't an option; I'd spent my entire life living in a city that provided me with easy access to public transportation. Nobody that went to my old high school ever bothered to get a licence.

Just another thing to add to the to-do list, I guess.

By the time the houses around me start to gradually grow from one story hovels, such as my own to average-sized, two-story homes to mansions with perfectly manicured lawns, white picket fences and a collection of expensive cars aligned inside of the driveways, I have already sweat through my Cheerios uniform and my hair had begun to frizz underneath the strict control of my normally tight ponytail. When I turn the corner onto Quinn's block, I have to do a double-take. Her house is bigger than about five of mine put together.

I swallow heavily, suddenly uncomfortable in the presence of something so enormous and force my way forward onto her front porch.

The Fabray's house is mounted with three glistening stories, topped with a grande picture window that is big enough to highlight the two top ones, along with a beautiful, crystal chandelier that catches the rays of the just-rising sun through the glass in such a manner that makes my eyes tear if I stare at it for too long. The siding is pure and white, the entire display giving off the initial impression of being nothing short of angelic. Of course, with Quinn Fabray living within these walls, I am not fool enough to believe that there isn't something much more sinister hiding on the inside.

Gulping heavily, I take the chance and ring the doorbell. The sound is grande and magnificent. It booms and echoes so loudly, that I can feel its vibrations inside of my stomach. Suddenly, I am feeling very self-conscious and stupid, sitting here on the front porch of the Fabray house at six o'clock in the morning, mangled and sweaty, clutching a binder full of sheet music firmly against my chest.

"What the hell are you doing here?"

By the time Quinn finally answers the door, I am so lost inside of my own world, tapping my toes nervously against the concrete stoop, drumming my fingers along the hard, plastic spine of my music binder that I am caught off guard. Immediately, the elaborate speech that I had spent my walk over here planning falls out of my brain into a puddle on the floor. I hadn't even heard the door open.

"We have an assignment to work on." I gather myself quickly, informing her of this like _she_ is the idiot in this scenario, not me. For good measure, I wave the sheet music directly in front of her face as evidence, just in case she had since forgotten what are punishment for fighting on Friday night entails – or at least, just in case she was _trying_ to.

"Are you crazy?" Her tone is aggravated, but her voice drops into a hushed whisper, eyes widening with an expression that indicates her belief that me showing up here at her house this morning to discuss something like glee warranted an immediate trip to the psyche ward. "It's six a.m. for Christ's sake, Santana, my parents are still home!" Her eyes shift nervously as though to check that nobody is within earshot before she shoves me backwards, out of her doorway and further out onto her porch. She follows, closing the door behind her for good measure. "You do realize if my father figures out that I'm wasting time with the glee club, he'll-"

She stops talking mid-sentence, whatever it is that her father will do to her should he come to learn about the events surrounding Friday night's party, plus the consequences that Quinn has endured as a result dissolving, permanently unspoken against her tongue.

I cock an eyebrow. Quinn looks afraid, as though she knows she has just spoken too much, and allowed to slip something that should never have been said in the first place. I watch as she shrinks back an inch or two and I swallow heavily, suddenly intrigued and dare I say, maybe even a little bit worried...

What exactly _would_ Quinn's father do if he found out that there was now a stain tarnishing his daughter's perfect reputation?

I try not to make assumptions, but I just don't know. Does he hit her? Abuse her? Yell with a particularly unnecessary ferocity? I struggle with conflicting emotions, the decision to decide whether or not it was my place to ask. It is hard to recognize the fact that there are people in this world who have fathers who are anything less than perfect, seeing as how I have been blessed with such a picturesque one of my own, but this is not the first time that I find myself thinking that there is a lot more to Quinn Fabray's personal life than what she ever decided to let on at school.

"He'll just be really mad, that's all." She finishes the sentence with a blatant lie that she doesn't even bother trying to make sound convincing.

"Your mom was in Principal Figgins' office yesterday, when Mr. Schuester was talking about us joining the glee club." I point out the obvious because I am currently experiencing a strenuous mental debate as to whether or not I should push the subject or let it go. "Didn't she tell your dad?"

"Of course, not." Quinn rolls her eyes as though it should be obvious, her parents' marital problems. "They can't last five seconds so much as being in the same room as one another. Unless it is to put on a show, they don't even acknowledge one another's existence."

"Listen, I'm sorry, that really sucks, okay but we have to get this done." I decide to let the subject go, because I don't feel very comfortable talking to Quinn about her personal life considering I wouldn't even go as far as to consider the two of us acquaintances, let alone friends. "There are only five more days until Sectionals, and we only have four of those days to learn this entire routine."

"What makes you think that I care about the stupid glee club?" She asks me, setting her jaw stern, and crossing her arms tight across her chest.

"I really don't care if you do." I reply with as much attitude behind my tone as I can manage. "But I do care about not getting suspended over something as stupid as not being able to work with you long enough to pick out one freaking song, so come on, we're doing this and we're getting it over with. Now."

She rolls her eyes at me so dramatically that I swear, I can see her brains rattling around inside of her skull through her pupils. Completely fed up with Quinn Fabray, I am just about to shoulder my way inside of her house and finish this project myself when I am countered – out of the blue – by not Quinn, but the distinct sound of arguing filtering inside of my ears.

At first, I actually think that it _is_ Quinn, simply out to look for another fight and to make this already difficult situation even worse. But gradually, my ears begin to settle. The sound resonates a little bit more clearly inside of my brain and I recognize that it is muffled with distance, and way too gruff to be coming out of Quinn's mouth.

I watch the blonde carefully as she scans her eyes nervously over her shoulder towards her closed front door, towards the direction of the sound. I guess that she is trying to mentally judge which one of the many rooms inside of her house, her parents were choosing to fight inside of this time.

Jesus, she really wasn't kidding when she said that the two of them went at it hard.

I shrink back, a little bit uncomfortable to have been caught in this situation, although I am sure that I am not as uncomfortable as Quinn is right now. Sure, I may not like the girl, but when you are paying witness to your parents arguing with a complete stranger present – a complete stranger whom you did not particularly like, mind you – I could only imagine how embarrassing that must be. Especially for somebody as proud as Quinn Fabray.

Her face is remarkably indifferent. I judge based on her expression alone, that this is not the first time that Quinn has found herself in a situation such as this. I wonder what it must be like, to live inside of a beautiful home, lavished with everything that the world has to offer, with two parents who can't stand each other. Yes, my father might be gone, but still, when he was alive, it was obvious that him and my mother had been soul mates. They defined the phrase _made for each other_ in every sense. It had hurt beyond belief when he had died, but this, this was a pain of an entirely different entity.

"Ugh, fine we'll work on your stupid project! But we have to do it at your house." Quinn throws her arms into the air with defeat, elevating her voice as though trying to drown out what we both know we have already heard.

"Okay." I make no motion to point the obvious out, or to even so much as acknowledge it. Instead, I watch as Quinn opens up her front door and reaches quickly for her backpack, making a hurry of seating the straps high against her shoulders. A neutral expression splays across her face like a mask.

"Where's your car?" She asks me, rushing down the front path leading towards the street, her eyes scanning back and forth in search for any signs of my non-existent vehicle.

"Uh... I don't have a car." I say, borderline embarrassed seeing as how the glistening, white Mercedes that Quinn had gotten to celebrate her getting her learner's permit on her fifteenth birthday is parked directly next to me. "I walked here. You'll have to drive."

"You're hopeless, you know that?" Quinn comments, rolling her eyes for what I am certain is the hundredth time in this brief visit alone, making a quiet scoffing sound that clicks against the back of her throat as though astonished by her disbelief that not every teenager is lucky enough to be graced with a brand new car on their birthday... "Fine, get in." She gestures for me to show myself into the passenger's seat of her car as she fishes for her keys inside of her bag.

"And make sure that you put some plastic wrap or something down before you sit. I just had this thing cleaned."

* * *

"I was thinking about maybe sticking with the Queen theme and doing Bohemian Rhapsody to finish our set list off."

"Too predictable." Quinn rejects yet another one of my many suggestions, barely paying any attention to me, instead studying her fingernail beds carefully as I sigh audibly and place yet another leaflet of sheet music face down on top of the _Rejected_ pile that is rapidly growing in the center of my dining room table.

"The Beatles."

"Too plain." I have been passing my proud display of ideas that I had worked so hard on last night to Quinn for the last ten or fifteen minutes now. Unsurprisingly, Quinn has said 'no' to absolutely every song choice that I had suggested thus far this morning.

"Les Mis."

"Ew." She is so appalled that I should actually suggest performing a show tune at a show choir competition that this time, she actually looks up at me when she denies it, a look of pure disgust written across her face. "No."

Now, I find myself growing frustrated. I slam the stack of music down against the table below me, so violently that the entire thing shakes threateningly against its frame. I stand up and lean in towards Quinn so that we are as face-to-face as we can possibly be with a table between us. I make sure that my expression is clear, that I am trying to indicate just how sick and tired I am of her contributing absolutely nothing to all of this aside from shooting down every single idea that I have suggested to her thus far.

"You can't say no to all of my ideas!" I tell her.

"I can if all of your ideas suck!" She roars back, slamming her hands down against the table and coming to a standing position herself so that we are glaring at each other, suddenly immersed inside of a brutal staring contest that seems to last forever.

By the time I come to the executive decision that I am finished playing these stupid, childish games with her, my eyeballs are burning and the tears have already begun to naturally well up inside of the corners of my eyes.

"Okay, what is your problem?" I have to ask, because I cannot sit here and merely glare at her all day, plus continuing to skirt around this issue that we clearly have with one another hasn't gotten us anywhere thus far, and I am sick and tired of having to tread on egg shells every time I am around her for fear that anything less will escalate into yet another altercation. I have never had any enemies before, at least, I have never had any enemies that I was so willing to stand up to before. I was not entirely sure what to do about this situation, and could only hope that my best efforts would be enough to neutralize it.

Historically, confrontation was something that I tried to avoid at all costs, but I have never felt as though I were going crazy more than I did when I was around Quinn Fabray and I was tired of it.

"Hmm, let's see, maybe it has something to do with my reputation being swallowed down the toilet bowl. Or maybe it's the fact that my boyfriend doesn't give a rat's ass about me." She pretends to think very hard about her answer as she ticks her multitude of reasons off against her fingers, but the motion is teeming with sarcasm. I can only glare. I was starting to get sick of it always being the same old story with Quinn, the same old woe-is-me excuses. I am starting to come to the conclusion that the thing that frustrated me the most about Quinn is that she tried so hard to act as superficial as the rest of the kids at William McKinley, when I can tell just be looking at her that she is capable of something so much more skin deep than everything that she was letting on. "Oh, I know. It must be the fact that my parents hate each other's guts and can't be in the same room with each other for more than five minutes without wanting to kill one another. Maybe that is my problem."

Just as I am starting to think that Quinn is totally incapable of honesty, she lets me in on display to the rarely seen inner-workings of just what it is that is going on inside of her head. I allow myself to relax immediately. Suddenly, Quinn is much less threatening than I had perceived her to be just a couple of seconds ago.

"I'm sorry." I say to her because I really do mean it. I knew that she had always been under a lot more pressure than anything that she had ever allowed to show off in her usual display at school, which was rarely anything less than a chronic perfection.

I watch as the blonde smolders briefly alongside my apology before sinking with defeat in a rare showing of emotion, and I can't help but to think; _there is so much that you don't know about a person._ I immediately feel bad. I wonder if maybe, I could have made her days a little bit easier, if I tried. If I'd treated her with a little more respect and a lot less anger.

I guess that the great thing about it, was all of the time that was still left for second tries.

"I don't need your sympathy." She shoots back at me icily, but for some reason, for the first time since I've met her I do not take Quinn's harsh tone to heart. Suddenly, everything I have ever known about the blonde is starting to make perfect sense.

"My dad is dead."

I blurt this harsh fact bluntly, and perhaps unfairly but it seems like the right thing to say in this moment for some odd reason. I study Quinn's face carefully, searching for her reaction. Her face is stone. She barely so much as blinks.

"Do you want a medal or something?"

"I'm just saying, my dad is dead. Your dad is an asshole. That gives us something that the two of us have in common, is all."

"Having Daddy issues doesn't give us something in common." Quinn mutters stubbornly, leaning back against her chair and crossing her arms determined across her chest. Despite everything that she is saying however, I know that not even she believes that what she is saying is true, she just doesn't want to admit to it for fear that it will come across as a sign of weakness.

"That sounds like a common trait to me." I shrug.

"Your dad died, Santana. My dad is a dick who won't divorce my mother because he is afraid that it will taint his reputation in this town. Now he is making our lives a living hell, turning my mother into some half-assed, borderline alcoholic who doesn't give a shit about either one of his children."

"You have a sibling?"

"A sister." Quinn tells me. "Franny is a lot older than me though. She got the hell out of Lima not fifteen minutes after she got her diploma from William McKinley High School, put herself through college, found a nice guy and married him... She barely even calls home anymore. We're not really close."

My eyebrows crinkle and meet each other in the middle. Immediately, my thoughts swerve over to Rachel. I think about myself, graduating high school in only a couple more months and think about what it might be like to simply pack my bags in the midst of this giant mess I like to call life, and leave without so much as looking back once. It is an idea that I cannot seem to imagine. The whole thing seems ludicrous. Big sisters were supposed to be there for you always; not turn their backs on you the second life got a little bit tough.

"After my dad died, my mom didn't even get out of bed for three weeks." I tell Quinn, because as long as we are making confessions, I might as well make my contribution. I don't even know why it is I am telling her this, or why she in turn had chosen to share so much with me, but as I sit here, thinking about my mother, laying inside of that bed motionless and despondent, for some reason it all just feels right. Maybe this was just mine and Quinn's way of reminding each other, just how much you can survive when it comes down to it. "Losing your parents sucks, whether they're killed at work one night, or they're just turning into somebody you never thought they could be. Either way, I can't imagine ever turning my back on Rachel, no matter how hard things got at home... You don't have to be alone through all of this, you know."

"I'm not alone." Quinn snaps quickly. Immediately, I know that she is trying to make reference to her popularity; the Cheerios, her circle of fake friends that hang out with her at school and invite her to all of the parties mainly out of pure envy, because they know that to maintain their status, they _have_ to, not because they particularly want to.

"You're the most popular girl at William McKinley, Quinn." I breathe the obvious. "But somehow, I think that you're just about the loneliest too."

"I can take care of myself, okay?" Quinn huffs, determined. Christ, this girl was stubborn.

"But you shouldn't have to." I tell her. "We're just kids, Quinn. We don't know what we're doing yet, how to truly live and deal with problems that are a lot bigger than any of us... It's not such a bad thing to have to rely on somebody every once in a while."

I shake my head, my eyes turning down towards my hands resting against the table in front of me, clenched so tightly together that my fingers are starting to turn white. Maybe this means that it is about time that I start taking my own advice as well.

"Never asking for help doesn't make you brave."

For the first time all morning, Quinn doesn't lash back at me with an immediate retort. Instead, she looks at me. In fact, she looks _through_ me. She takes her time to study me, and in turn, I study her and immediately, I find myself starting to wonder, if Mr. Schuester's grande plan for the two of us has maybe worked all along.

Now, I wasn't about to stand up and hug her, or invite her out to get our hair and nails done together, or go buy her a BFF necklace or anything like that, but I can't help to think that maybe, from here on out, I might actually be able to call Quinn Fabray something of a friend; at least, a friend that was not afraid to snap me back into my place the second that I started getting out of line...

But Quinn does not allow herself to linger for very long, as she often does not. Instead, she jumps back to action. Silent, she reaches over towards my stack of sheet music, and contributes to the assignment for the first time all morning, thumbing quickly through the pages, her eyes only glancing briefly across the titles on the tops of the pages before she mentally discards that idea and moves on to the next one.

She is almost at the very bottom of the pile, making me think that she really is going to reject every last song choice that I had seen at least some potential in just last night when she pauses, her cheeks glowing slightly so that I know in an instant that we have found the one.

"This is it."

She smiles brighter than I have ever seen her do in the week since I have met her. Pulling her selection from the pile of rejects, she spins it quickly inside of her hands, flipping it so that I can read for myself exactly what it is that she has selected.

_You Can't Always Get What You Want _by The Rolling Stones.

I smile with approval. How fitting.


	8. Perfect, Brand New Day

**Chapter 8**** - Perfect, Brand New Day**

Saturday comes fast.

In fact, Saturday comes a little bit _too_ fast, if you're asking me. I was a nervous performer to begin with. Couple that with the fact that it was a routine that we had only just put the finishing touches on yesterday, and that's it. I am a nervous wreck.

But then again, if I could do it with a group of girls as competitive and world-renowned as the William McKinley Cheerios, chances are that I can do it with our tiny glee club as well. I guess that all I can do now is wait and pray that my astounding luck regarding hidden performing-arts talents wasn't about to run out any time soon, because as it stands I am going to need all of the luck that I can get to get me through this one.

I stand in the lobby, chronically glancing up at the new-aged, digital clock dangling above the entrance way of the auditorium as I rub my sweaty palms against my dress in several well-calculated, albeit failed attempts to keep them dry. I practice the deep breathing exercises that Rachel had taught me as I watch my younger sister pace in circles around me, running her scales like a well-oiled machine. Her motions are making me dizzy. If anything, they leave me more nervous, if that were all possible.

I wonder what she is feeling. A portrait of confidence earlier this morning, Rachel refused to admit to anything other than a stringent readiness regarding today's performance. At the same time, I couldn't help but notice that she'd barely touched her breakfast earlier this morning, and now she couldn't seem to stop walking in those damn circles.

The five minute warning lights flash violently, the crowd beginning its decent from their well-deserved break inside of the lobby back towards their seats in order to await our performance. It is only a matter of time until the only people left were the thirteen of us, all standing in our respective lines; girls on the left, boys on the right, waiting for our opportunity to shine - hopefully brighter than the rest.

"Are you nervous?"

I am so tense that when Brittany jumps on top of my shoulders from behind, giddy with adrenaline as she echoes the exact same sentiments that she had asked me the night of my Cheerios debut, I jump.

She wears a smile from ear-to-ear and looks excited like somebody just told her she had won an all-expenses paid trip to Paris or something, rather than the actuality, that she was merely preparing to sing and dance in front of an enormous audience.

I ponder her features briefly and wonder suddenly whether or not this girl ever gets nervous. If she does, I have never seen it. Maybe this is why we compliment each other so well; at least, in my personal opinion anyway. I worry enough for the both of us.

"A little bit." I admit through a shrug, but my face pales when I hear the familiar music begin to blare through the set of speakers just above our heads so that a little bit actually comes off seeming like a lot a bit... The shrill violins are enough to inform me that it is time. For right now, it was Rachel's turn to shine; an impressive solo ballad designed to kick off the rest of us. I had no doubts that she wouldn't let us down. It was _me_ that I was worried about.

"Come on, let's watch." Brittany grabs onto my hand just as Rachel punches her way through the auditorium doors, disappearing behind the strong oak.

Dragging me forward, she opens the door but a crack so that the two of us can peak our heads inside in an effort to read how the performance is going before it even truly starts...

The auditorium is packed. I swear, I have never seen so many people in my entire life, or maybe it only felt that way given the circumstance... Either way, Rachel navigates her way through the aisles seemingly unfazed. She twists and turns with a coordinated perfection. Her voice sinks and rises across the impressed crowd with a tone of dedicated precision, a homage to the rigorous practice sessions that I happen to know she contributed hours to, both at rehearsal as well as at home.

She is flawless.

My eyes are wide with awe the entire time that I am watching her.

I have listened to Rachel sing this exact same song a hundred times before in my lifetime, but today, it sounds different. Today, she sings with a perfection that I have never heard of even her before. Rachel crafts through the difficult piece as though she had spent months having it sculpted by experts, rather than it having merely been self-taught, singing into the makeshift microphone that was her hairbrush in front of her bedroom mirror every single day since the day that she was able to say her first word - _Barbra._

I wonder in this moment if Rachel knows how truly unique that she is from everybody else, and can't help to think that she _has_ to.

"Come on, come on let's go. It's our turn!"

I am so entranced by Rachel's solo performance that I almost miss my own cue until Brittany manages to shuffle me back into the conscious world of responsibilities and performance obligations with a strong nudge against my shoulder.

The good news is that I am so absorbed with my own thoughts that suddenly, I don't even remember why I had been so nervous in the first place. I feel like Rachel's performance had displaced an additional swagger behind my step as I march down the aisle ways of the auditorium and down towards the stage, where Rachel is enthralled inside of the grande finale of her performance like nothing I have ever seen before in my life. Even the audience is so hypnotized by her voice that they barely seem to notice that the rest of the glee club had made their way inside of the auditorium around her.

I scan the awestruck faces, the glisten behind mesmerized eyes. At first, I am admiring with pride, the look that they are giving my sister. Eventually, I find myself looking for my mother. I know that she is here, and I want to see the expression that she wears upon realizing that Vocal Adrenaline won't be able to breeze through Regionals after all... But I don't see her. The auditorium is much too crowded for me to so much as hope to catch a glimpse of her. By the time I am safely on top of the stage, lined up in my place behind Rachel, I give up hope of finding her. The spotlights are so bright - directed straight at me - I pretty much give up hope of seeing anything at all. If anything however, this makes it easy to forget that there is even an audience seated in front of me at all.

The concept is remarkably soothing. I find myself relaxing in an instant.

When the music sounds once more, the only thing that I need to really get me going is a couple motivational, concentrated deep breaths. I stand straight inside of my spot, legs slightly spread with my arms at my sides and chin pointed confidently in the where I stand, I can just make out Brittany and I smile at her in the midst of all of this.

In the midst of our routine, she returns the gesture like a wash of calm and I lock eyes with her for the rest of the time that we are performing with the hope that she knows that when I do sing, I am doing so only to her.

We round into our final performance, and much to my regret, I am forced to twist away from Brittany in a pre-planned choreography move - one that sure as hell wasn't my idea - all the way at the opposite side of the stage. There, I team up with my dance partner for a series of duet dancing -

Noah.

Like a blow to the chest, it is a constant reminder that I am with _him_, not with her... And yes, I know that nobody is physically threatening me over here, holding a gun to my head and forcing me to date Noah Puckerman but still, on most days, some days it does.

It is nothing to say about Noah himself. It is not him, as much as it is this disguise; the truth about me, the truth about me and him that is starting to feel like a trap among itself... I just wish that he wasn't so good to me. I wish that he wasn't so sweet when we were alone, or that he didn't defend me in front of his friends. I wish that I didn't like him so much, so that when the day inevitably came that I would have to tell him the truth and break his heart it wouldn't be inevitable that I was going to be losing a friend.

My body comes to a sudden halt on its own accord. It stops dancing instinctively, ceasing the moves that I have come to know so well in these last couple of days that I manage to perform them without even paying attention.

Suddenly, instead of music I am instead surrounded by the sound of wild applause... My heart thumps frantically inside of my chest, my breaths filtering in and out in a series of rapid panting. I am exhausted, and I can't tell whether or not this is a result of the physical exertion, the mental stimulation, or the adrenaline rush of our performance.

Perhaps it was a combination of all three.

The only thing that I did know for sure - as the stage lights begin to dim into the house lights all around me - is that the audience is starting to come to their feet, rising like a tidal wave looking to swallow us whole. They roar with applause in a gesture of approval...

I guess we've done good.

* * *

I scan the crowded lobby for any signs of a familiar face.

The New Directions had taken Sectionals with such ease, that I have been washed with a sense of confidence that makes me want to do nothing but flaunt the victory in front of my mother, seeing as how it was now guaranteed that we would be facing off with each other come Regionals.

I clutch the over sized trophy that we had been rewarded for beating both a deaf kids' choir as well as a group of delinquent females tight inside of my hands. I am beaming with pride and in that, have seemed to forget the concept of modesty.

I duck and maneuver about the sea of people with an expertise that only a dancer could ever manage, scanning across the tops of heads quickly for any sign of my mother. Rachel follows close behind me, because if I know my sister - which I definitely do - her thought processes are definitely similar to that of my own right about now.

The only thing that either of us want to do is gloat.

I don't manage to catch my first glimpse of my mother until we are already at the main doors, and even then it is only a quick flash of the back of her head, dark, chestnut hair flowing brilliantly as she chats animatedly with a man that I have never seen before in my life.

She spots the two of us quickly through the corner of her eye, waving excitedly towards us and gesturing for us to approach. I raise a skeptical eyebrow while Rachel returns my mother's wave less than enthusiastically, half-assed raising her hand in the air and leaving it at that.

This mysterious man follows our mother like a duckling; _our_ mother, who I only just notice has come to our Sectionals competition early this morning with a fresh hair cut, makeup done to the T and wearing something that I think would better suite a fancy dinner-date rather than a high school glee competition.

Instinctively, my back arches like a threatened cat. I put myself in front of Rachel in an effort to create a dominant barricade between him and us. I have absolutely no idea who this guy is, but I have an idea and if that idea is anything even close to true, I already know that I am not going to like it. I am not going to like it one bit.

"Girl's, you were amazing!"

The second that she is within a safe distance, our mother begins to praise us with the congratulations of our performance. I can tell, just by the look on her face that she is genuine in her praise as she reaches over and wraps me into a strong hug, trapping the trophy still clutched inside of my hands between us, releasing me only after the metal digs almost painfully inside of my skin, turning to mimic the same motion with my sister. "Rachel, your solo was incredible. I am so proud of you girls."

"Thanks..." Rachel does not sound particularly gratuitous as she shies quickly out from underneath our mother's arms. For all of the confidence that Rachel has managed to project on stage, she is surprisingly uncomfortable around strangers, particularly around this very new, very _male_ stranger, standing awkwardly behind our mother as though he is awaiting his introduction.

He props himself up against the ugly, lime-green tile wall behind him, his hands crossed directly in front of him as though he is trying to figure out what it is that he should be doing with them. Aside from the look of clear discomfort, this man is tall with the kind of muscular build that doesn't come from a gym, but comes naturally, like from working in a physically demanding job all of his life. On top of that, I would be lying if I said that he wasn't handsome, with a distinct understanding of how to work a good scruff and short, dark hair.

But still, there is something sneaky behind his expression. Something I cannot put my finger on exactly, but it is there. I know that it is there.

Okay, so I'm not sure if it is really, truly there or if I am just being unfairly biased given the circumstances...

"Okay girls listen, there is somebody who I want you to meet." Our mother sees her two daughters clearly eye-balling this mysterious man and knows that there is no possible way to avoid the inevitable any longer. "This is Andrew. Andrew Robertson."

_Andrew;_ he jolts into action at the sound of his name, reaching down in order to extend a welcoming hand towards me first, and then Rachel. I accept his hand, shaking it politely, but I commit to the handshake for only as long as I have to. That's it.

The reminder clicks inside of my head like a lightning bolt. Just a couple of days now I can remember being seated at our dining room table, spooning yet another dinner comprised solely of take-out onto paper plates as my mother ran out of the room like a giddy teenager to talk on the phone.

_"Oh, hi Andrew."_

"It's nice to finally get to meet you girls." He flashes us a quick smile. It is brilliant, and captivating, and I can immediately tell how it was that my mother managed to become instantly captivated. It was something inside of his eyes; they were deep, and blue, and looked as though they could penetrate straight into your very soul.

They remind me immediately of my dad's.

"Me and Andrew, well... well we are seeing each other now, girls." I jerk my eyebrows so far up my forehead that they disappear inside of my hairline, not because this bit of information comes as a particular surprise, but because of the way she skirts around coming out and actually saying that she has been "seeing" this Andrew character for at least a couple of days now. It's almost as though she were one of my classmates in my high school as opposed to my mother.

But the implication was there enough, I guess. Maybe this was just her hopeful way of making an already awkward situation just a little bit less so. The fact of the matter was, this was not exactly an easy conversation to have, especially in the middle of a crowded high school auditorium.

I begin to fidget nervously with my fingers, suddenly finding myself very uncomfortable to the point that a soft tingling begins to creep its way down my spine. It is a long cry from the pride, the joy of winning that I had experienced only moments ago. Rachel and I take a quick glance towards each other. We speak our feelings on the matter without ever actually speaking because I know my sister enough to know that she sees this man standing before us as nothing less than a threat. The worst-case scenario presenting itself in a flash of light. A problem growing steeper and steeper besides each and every hurricane and tornado and bombing and war. Me, well I wasn't really sure what to think, how to feel. I'd known about this guy for some time now, the only difference was that here today, right now, he was standing directly in front of me rather than being shrouded by a mysterious telephone call.

And despite the fact that she may have not wanted to believe it, I am sure that Rachel knew about him too.

So where Rachel sees disaster, I see a harmless means of moving forward by my mother. A fling. A means to recover. Our father, he was gone, and as harsh as it sounds, he wasn't coming back. What the hell was our mother supposed to do, spend the rest of her life by herself? I would be leaving for college in only a manner of months. Only a couple of years behind me, Rachel would make her inevitable bid for New York to begin her bid to achieve Broadway royalty... It would be selfish of us not to think about what would come of our mother, then.

She deserves this, I tell myself. Truly, she does.

I nod my head gently towards Rachel, trying to get her to see reason with a stern look on my face as though to say - _be good._

"Hi, Andrew."

I finally make the offer only after a couple of tense seconds in which I can physically see my mother cracking beneath the fear and tension of waiting to see exactly how this entire situation was going to play out. I shift our championship trophy - almost bigger than I was - into my left hand, freeing the right to offer to him. He reciprocates with a handshake so strong in his relief that I feel the bones inside of my hand shift.

"Santana, right?" He pretends not to know for the sake of humoring me. "And Rachel?" He releases my hand and turns towards Rachel. Her arms are crossed determined across her chest, and when Andrew reaches out towards her, she does not move right away, creating an incredibly tense situation.

She glares, judging him up and down as the rest of us wait for her to make her next me with bated breath. Finally, she decides that this is not the time, nor the place to make a scene and, uncrossing her arms, she shakes his hand in a single up and down motion before pulling away and wrapping her arms tightly into her body once more.

"Your mom talks about the two of you all the time." He stumbles a little bit, but recovers through an attempt to initiate small talk, but by this time, his soft smile is laced with nerves as though he is standing on trial before a judge rather than facing his new girlfriend's two teenage daughter's for the first time. In a way, I guess he kind of was. "Nothing but good things, of course. She mentioned how good of performers the two of you were, but I had no idea that you were that good. You girls have quite the talent." He laughs nervously, but nobody reciprocates and the motion turns into a cough that eventually fades into silence.

He seems like a nice enough guy, I guess but even I - usually an expert at reading people - am having a difficult time placing him. I suppose I would have to get to know the guy for longer than five minutes before I can become a complete judge on his personality.

I am so busy trying to judge this man's sense of character, and Rachel determined in her silence as though she is staging a protest, that neither of us respond to his generous compliment, however rude that may be, leaving the two adults standing before us scrambling to fill the void of silence.

"I know, let's go out to celebrate!" My mother claps her hands together, perhaps too enthusiastically in order to expunge the quiet, because it is creeping its way inside of all of our veins, lingering just long enough to leave a stale taste against our tongues.

"Good idea." Andrew is quick to agree and seems remarkably relieved for a means to escape this situation, or to at least transfer it to a semi-private location such as a restaurant. "Come on. I'm buying." He shuttles us forward with the age-old idea of winning over both mine as well as Rachel's affections through his wallet, but for now I comply willingly seeing how my stomach was just now starting to bubble with the realization of how hungry I was seeing as how I had been so nervous for this performance earlier this morning, that I hadn't been able to keep any food down. I was not passing this opportunity by.

I offer Rachel a quick shrug. What's the harm of lunch, right? But she is still giving me that _I'm not so sure about this_ look. Despite all of that, she follows the three of us out of the auditorium anyway. I hold back with her, a safe distance from my mother and this Andrew guy in front of us. We watch from behind as he reaches up and drapes a delicate arm around her shoulders and guides her through the doors.

Scoffing with disgust, Rachel shoulders her way through the swinging doors with an aggression that I have never seen of my little sister before and pushes her way outside.

By the time we our out from beneath the safety of the indoors, I notice that it is raining. I crinkle my nose as the droplets land against my skin, destroying my hair just when I am supposed to be showing myself in public, and weaving their way inside of the pleated material my dress... I hadn't even known that it was supposed to rain, but Andrew seems to have come prepared. He opens an umbrella, holding it high above my mother's head, getting himself soaked in the process. My hands grow slick with the moisture, slipping beneath the shiny metal of the trophy still clutched inside of my hands, the trophy that Mr. Schuester had offered for us to keep in our possession until we were to bring it back to school on Monday to display proudly. He'd told us that it was because Rachel's voice, as well as both mine and Quinn's contribution of song choice had been the deciding factors that secured our victory, that we deserved it. Mostly, I think that he was just trying to intimidate our mother.

I don't think she really noticed.

When we finally reach our family's Range Rover, parked all the way at the end of the crowded parking lot, I am drenched. But while everybody else makes a quick motion to duck inside of the vehicle and escape the weather, I take my time. I just don't see the point anymore.

Looking up towards the sky, I watch as the ugly, gray clouds swirl angrily, pelting droplets of rain against my skin with such a ferocity that it pricks and almost hurts. The whirling storm fits remarkably with my mood, so dramatically mixed after an exhausting morning of excitement combined with such a further array of emotions that I am hard pressed just to keep up.

"Santana, let's go you're going to catch your death out here!"

My mother jolts me back into the conscious world, yelling at me through the driver's side window, opened but a crack in order to keep the rain from working its effects on her any more than it already has. She displays a sense of concern about something as simple as the rain like only a mother could ever manage. With a sigh, I leave the weather to do its business and slip into the backseat of the car behind her, settling into the cool, leather seats and pulling the seat belt tight across my chest before I set our trophy protectively against the floor mats at my feet, guarding it safely between my knees.

From the front seat, my mother switches the key inside of the ignition and the engine roars to life. As she pulls out from the parking space and back towards the main road, I lean my forehead up against the tinted glass window, turning my attention upwards to the world whizzing past. It has a strange, hypnotizing effect on me. I guess that I had just forgotten how important that it was to stop every once in a while and watch the sky brewing directly over your head...

Even if you couldn't read exactly what it was that it had in store for you.

* * *

The first sign that you are getting old is when you wake up on the morning of your birthday and completely forget about it.

But come Monday morning, I wake up and do just that.

In fact, the only reminder that I do have is the alarm clock that comes in the form of my petite little sister, bounding inside of my bedroom much earlier than even my actual alarm was slated to wake me up. She bounces like a jumping bean inside of my bedroom and pounces directly on top of me, jolting me wide awake.

"Ugh, Rachel what the hell!"

I am not a morning person. Never have been and never will be. In my half-asleep state, I respond to Rachel's waking me up by providing her with a harsh jab to the ribs, trying to get her off of me so that I may be left to roll over and embellish upon the last, precious couple of minutes of sleep that I do have before I have to start getting ready for school, but today, Rachel is persistent.

"Wake up, Santana!" She ducks down and yells so loudly, directly in my ear that my brains rattle inside of my skull. "I made you breakfast."

"Ugh... why?" I groan loudly, looking up towards her through one, half-opened eye, the other being still firmly glued shut with sleep. I am noticeably confused, and have every reason to be. Rachel never cooked me breakfast. Well, she did once, but all she did was try to feed me some tofu, vegan crap that I just did not have the stomach for like she did. After that, she'd promised never to make me breakfast ever again and so far, she had been abiding by that promise just fine.

"Hmm, let's see..." She pretends to think about the reasoning behind her generosity, choking in her laughter regarding my inability to pull myself together in the mornings. "Maybe it's for that little, tiny event, you know, the one that comes once a year, always around the same time... The one that commemorates the day of your birth."

"Oh, shit!" My eyes dart open and I shoot up inside of my bed, feeling like a complete moron for forgetting that today, I was eighteen years old. Today, I was no longer a child but a legal adult, no longer under the care or responsibility of anybody above me.

The world was suddenly looking a lot bigger than it had when I had fallen asleep last night.

"Language, Santana!" Rachel scolds me, because even if it is my birthday, that is not enough to give me a free pass against my little sister who, more often than not, acts more like my mother than my own mother does some days.

"I'm sorry." I am quick to apologize.

"I forgive you." She waves me off. "But only today because it's your birthday, even though I'm apparently the only one who remembered..." She gives a dramatic scoff and rolls her eyes belligerently as though appalled by this notion. I can't help but to laugh at her. Rachel was a character of an entirely different sort. "Happy birthday, Santana."

"Thank you."

"Now, come on!" She gives me no time to linger. Instead, she reaches over and grabs me by the wrist, pulling me out of my bed and onto my feet with a surprising strength for a girl of her size. "Now that you took your sweet time waking up, you're gonna have to hurry up and eat or else we're going to be late for school."

"You didn't make any of that tofu, vegan garbage did you?" I ask skeptically, rubbing the sleep quickly from my eyes as I scurry with bare feet against the hard wooden floors towards the kitchen, trying to keep up with Rachel who skips merrily ahead of me. Almost fifteen years living with her, and I still could not comprehend how it is that anybody could ever possibly act like that this early in the morning.

"For your information, it is not garbage, it's a healthy alternative to a deplorable lifestyle that more and more Americans are falling into the trap of every single day." She snaps back in a matter-of-fact manner that only she could pull off with such expertise. "Living natural _is_ natural, Santana. Not like that crap you guys put inside of your bodies, treating it like it's a garbage disposal."

"Meat _is _natural." I point out, and try very hard to keep a straight face when she shoots me a glare in return. "So..." I breathe tauntingly. "You didn't make any of that tofu, vegan garbage did you?"

I repeat my initial sentiments to mess with her only partially because I know that it will get a rise out of her and what are older sisters for if not for messing with their younger counterparts, right? On the other hand, I am being totally serious, because the reminder of the last time Rachel fed me scrambled tofu, combined with some creepy egg substitute that felt as though I were trying to swallow a jellyfish every time I took a bite, was quickly making me start to lose my appetite.

"You're intolerable." She rolls her eyes before turning to face me, hands on her hips and her jaw set so tight that I would swear to it, I wasn't looking at her in this moment, but at our mother. "I made pancakes."

"Oh thank God." I breathe with a sigh of relief. "I knew that I kept you around for a reason." Throwing my hands up with mock rejoice, I walk towards the table, stopping before passing by Rachel so that I could give her a quick hug, pecking her gently against the top of her head just to prove that despite all of my messing around, I really was grateful. "Thanks, Rach." I whisper into her ear.

"They're soy pancakes."

Her response is muttered under her breath, but she says it with a smile so that I can't be entirely sure whether or not she is being serious, or she is just trying to mess with my head. I guess there are some things that we are just better off never knowing.

"Alright, come on. Sit down." She gestures towards my usual chair, which I only now notice, she has gone so far as to attach a small balloon to. I laugh at her effort as she guides me to my seat like a waitress, even going as far as to pull the chair out for me so that I can sit down.

"You didn't have to do all of this." I tell her as she begins to scoop my meal out of the frying pan and into the awaiting plate in front of me.

"Of course I did." Is all that she responds with before she leaves it at that, because we both know what she is thinking. This was a family tradition. Every year on either my or Rachel's birthday, no matter what day of the week that it landed on, our mother would start it off with a huge family breakfast that we would eat, just the four of us. No matter what.

Now that our father dead and our mother was working so hard just to keep food on the table that we barely had the opportunity to see her anymore, it has kind of put a damper on that tradition. I had to give it to Rachel though for putting her best effort forward in order to keep it alive.

"Eat, San." She scolds more like a parent than a younger sister as she plops herself down inside of the seat across from me, eyeing up the fact that I was only just picking apart at my plate with my fork, the reminder of just how much I miss the way things used to be putting a bit of a damper on my appetite.

"I was just waiting for you." I counter quickly.

"They're real pancakes, you know. Not actually soy." In her fear that my resistance to trying her breakfast had something to do with her teasing me about her pancakes being vegan-friendly, she fesses up the truth. I smile up at her sadly, trying to assure her that the content of her food was not the resistance that I was having before I stab at a big bite with my fork and take it.

"They're delicious." I assure her, my mouth completely full as I speak, smirking at her from behind my fork, and they are, truly.

As always, Rachel delivers.

Despite Rachel's panic, rushing me through breakfast for fear of us being late for school - something that she absolutely could not tolerate, no matter what the circumstances - we arrive at William McKinley that morning about fifteen minutes before the late bell is even slated to ring.

We had been forced to be picked up by Sam and Brittany that morning, after Noah had called us under mysterious circumstances, claiming that he could not be our ride today; I don't know, something about going to the weight room early with Finn in order to prepare for the Titans' playoff bid slated to begin this coming weekend... He didn't even mention the fact that it was my birthday, and although normally I am not as selfish and vain as to let this get to me - especially seeing how I myself had forgotten about the whole thing - seeing as how it was my first birthday I had the opportunity to spend with somebody other than my family, it left a nasty feeling deep inside of my gut.

But I play it off as cool, hopping out of Sam Evans' car and marching straight to my locker. I try not to concern myself with the idea, but can't help but to silently fume... That is until I turn the corner down the Senior hallway only to find Noah, dressed much too nicely for having just spent the entire morning in the gym, adorning a pair of dark jeans and a button down, holding a bouquet of flowers tight inside of his hands and wearing a soft expression on his face that deviates so greatly from his usual bad-boy persona that I am forced to do a double take.

"Hey, babe." He stiffens as he spots me approaching him, arching up to his full height before handing me the flowers and leaning forwards to entrap me into a deep kiss that I return gratefully. "Happy birthday."

"I thought you forgot." I admit, pulling away from him so that I can bury my nose inside of his flowers. They smell delicious and I pretend not to notice the fact that they are crudely wrapped in what looks like the decorative paper that people shove inside of gift bags to cover up whatever is inside. I pretend even harder not to notice the clumps of dirt that are falling out of the bottom of the wrapping, clearly informing me that he'd probably just jumped into his elderly neighbors' garden early this morning to pull up some of her prized tulips. After all, it was the thought that counts.

"Who, me?" He feigns offense. "Never."

"Santana, I didn't know that today was your birthday!" Brittany staggers towards her locker a couple of paces behind me, having been held down by Sam, who has his arm wrapped tightly across her shoulder in a display of affection that makes me feel remarkably uncomfortable.

She ducks out from underneath his arm and pounces on top of me in a violent hug that throws me off of my stability, but it is all worth it. I embrace the victory of her choosing me over him, and quickly regain my bearing in order to return the hug, easily the best birthday present that I have ever, or will ever receive all day.

"Eighteen, right?" She asks me, and I nod in confirmation. "That's huge! We'll have to celebrate. This weekend after the football game, we'll have a party in your honor!" I give her a skeptical look. Last time I had attended a party in my honor, it had ended with a fist fight and a three-day long hangover... Not to mention the police coming knocking at my door. Now that I was eighteen, and considered by law, a fully responsible adult, the idea of the law coming down hard against me didn't quite seem as worth it.

"We'll do it at somebody else's house this time, okay?" She adds cheerily upon noticing the skepticism in my eyes, and I give her a nervous laugh because that was just the effect that she had on me.

"Sounds good." I tell her, although the truth is that I am still trying to recover from that last party, and don't think that I am quite ready to drink again well... ever.

"How about we kick off that celebration a little bit early. Friday seems a bit far away." From behind me, Noah wraps his arms around my neck, draping them over my shoulders and down the front of my chest.

"What do you mean?" I turn my head over my shoulder, looking up towards him for an explanation as he begins to rock us gently back and forth.

"Let me take you out to dinner tonight." He offers. "Come on, Breadstix. I'm buying."

"I may have to give you a rain check on that one. My mom wants me home for family dinner tonight... It's kind of a tradition." I sigh, disappointed that I am forced to turn him down on his offer, especially after how he'd surprised me like he did this morning... It doesn't go unnoticed to me, how quickly I had accepted Brittany's offer to celebrate, while in an exact opposite fashion, how quick I was to decline Noah's. I just hope that nobody else had picked up on it.

At least I had a good excuse.

"Well, I wouldn't want to mess with your traditions." He smiles, leaving no indication of being upset, but then again Noah was not the kind of guy to display his emotions, especially inside of a hallway that he had worked so hard to rightfully own using nothing less than a bad-boy demeanor.

"You're not mad?"

"Mad?" He blows off the idea. "Nah, besides I like that, you know, family traditions. The only tradition that my family has is to eat Chinese food and watch Schindler's List together once a year. I'll make it up to you some other time, okay?"

"Okay." I smile as he leans forward to kiss me just one more time, melting inside of him in a manner that makes me feel so protected, so loved that I just can't help myself.

"Um... Santana?"

I pull away from Noah at the sound of hearing somebody calling my name with a tone of discomfort in their voice. I flush red with embarrassment at having just been caught sucking face with none other than Noah Puckerman when I glance up only to see our school's guidance counselor - Emma Pillsbury - approaching.

"I, uh... I'm sorry to interrupt." She is a small mousy woman, who comes across as being very nervous all of the time, this being no exception. "I was wondering if maybe I could talk to you real quick in my office before class?"

"Uh... yeah, sure." I agree, slightly nervous for the prospects of what she was going to say to me. Was it against school policy to display PDA in the hallways? Was she going to yell at me some more for the party that I had thrown at my house two weeks ago now? Try and punish me some more? I didn't have the slightest clue...

I glance up towards Noah, my eyes slanted with a silent apology about having to cut our time together short.

"Go." He nods me off quickly, squeezing my shoulders tightly, yet gently with his strong hands in the gesture of a silent goodbye. "I'll catch up with you later, okay?"

"Okay." I nod, accepting his offer when he leans down and gives me one, last kiss goodbye. I lean into his touch, wishing so hard that it didn't possess the capacity to turn me into Jell-O with every turn, but it does, and I think that that is what made this whole thing so hard...

He let's go of me without so much as another word, and I watch him leave briefly as he saunters down the hall, just in time for the bell to ring high above our heads... Gradually, the students begin to scramble for their respective classrooms, but this morning, I possessed a free pass in the form of the petite red-head in front of me so that I stand my ground surrounded by them.

I follow Ms. Pillsbury into her office, rounding into the small room and swallowing heavily with nerves as she closes the door and gestures for me to take a seat. I accept her offer, watching her as she takes her sweet time, rounding around to the other side of her desk and into her chair.

"I'm not... I'm not in trouble, am I?" I can't help but to ask through an impossibly dry throat, because I am having a hard time deciphering why it is that Emma Pillsbury has called me inside of her office this morning. I can't think off the top of my head, of anything stupid that I have done recently but then again, I _have_ been doing a lot of stupid things as of late. It was difficult to keep track of them all.

"Why, do you have a guilty conscious?" The counselor retorts, and I raise a hesitant eyebrow. She's joking. I think. But then again, Ms. Pillsbury was not known as one of the best practical jokers in the world. "Uh... no, Santana. You're not in trouble." She changes her pace quickly upon realizing that I have not managed to pick up on her joking tone. Reaching down, suddenly eager to find something to do with her hands, I watch as she shuffles a large stack of papers against her desk, thumbing through them quickly before finally finding exactly what it is that she is looking for. "Actually, I called you into my office today because I wanted to talk to you about your plans for after graduation."

"After graduation?" I question, because although now that I think about it, this is the most obvious reason for why she would call this meeting today, it is the last thing that I had been expecting. Despite the fact that the event was indeed looming in my very near future, it is not something that I had given a lot of thought into. Sure, I had started making plans as far back as a year ago. Back in Boston, I had been excited for the prospect of college, eager to get out of Southie, to get away from a childhood that had tortured me so... But ever since then, my life had started to take turns that I had not expected, and after a while, it grew so crowded that everything that I had ever thought I had known about my future disappeared, and post-high school plans kind of just took a back seat to everything else going on in my life.

"Well, yeah." She nods as though this much should be obviously. "Now, I know that I usually start to have these discussions with the students in their Junior year, but seeing as how you are new here, there's a little bit less room for us to dilly-dally. You're going to have to start getting serious if you want to have an opportunity to start college in the fall."

"College?" I keep questioning her intentions in a manner that I'm sure makes me sound like an idiot. I raise my eyebrows against the mention of the word as though it is a ridiculous thought although I know it wasn't. At this stage of the game, college should have been the one thought in the forefront of my mind. It looked bad only on me, the fact that it wasn't.

"Are you planning on attending college, Santana?" She suddenly has to ask, responding to my tone of surprise because although she had initially just assumed that after graduation, I would be headed straight to college, my reaction to that assumption was apparently not what she'd expected.

"Uh... yeah, I guess." I tell her.

The truth was, that I _had_ planned on going to college, but that plan was in a past so distant that I could hardly remember it anymore. While I had been eager to get out of South Boston however, I hadn't planned on leaving the city entirely. The way I saw it, there were plenty of schools in the area to choose from, and I could lower the financial burden on my family by picking a state school for which I could get a discounted rate, and living at home while I worked my way through the required credits.

"Well what is it that you want to go for? What interests you." She asks, and I cringe at the question. Even when I had had a firm idea that college was something that I wanted to do after high school, I still had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. At the time, I figured I'd just push through all of the classes that I had to take in order to graduate at first, and test the waters from there, but the more I discuss it, the more I think that I am never going to know what the hell it is that I want to do with my life.

"I don't know." I admit, but that answer seems lame, so I try to dig deep and pull at least something out. "Between the Cheerios and being a part of the glee club, I'm starting to think that maybe the whole performing arts thing might be for me... At first, I wanted to stay in Boston but maybe... maybe I can go to New York?"

The way it comes out of my mouth, this sounds more like a question than an actual, solid plan.

"That's a tough business to get into." Ms. Pillsbury looks at me gravely. She might as well stop beating around the bush and just come right out and tell me that this is the stupidest idea that she has ever heard in her however many years of helping students map out their post-high school graduation plans.

"I guess." I shrug. "My mom did the whole Broadway thing, and Rachel... well she's definitely going to end up in New York after she graduates. Why not me too?"

"Well, do you want to do this for your mom and your sister, or do you want to do it for you?"

"I don't know." I consider her question, but she is really beating into me with the tough ones today, making it difficult to wrap my head around it all at one time. "For me, I guess."

"Well Santana, you do have a little bit of time to think it over. Not a lot, but some." She offers me some semblance of relief as she gathers together a large collection of pamphlets and college brochures and hands them over to me. I gather them into my hands and flip through them, scanning over the titles at the tops of the pages. Mostly, they're of a whole bunch of different colleges that range everywhere from Boston University, to NYU, to Allen County Community College.

Talk about dreaming big.

"You're a smart girl, getting into a good school shouldn't be a problem for you, but I do urge you to start thinking about this a little bit harder, okay?" She prompts me. "Maybe you can start going on a couple of college tours with your mom. Also, I encourage you to sign up for the SATs that we're going to have here next month. And get a kick start on those applications, alright? Most of them are due around February, March so you have plenty of time."

"Okay." I nod, looking up from the papers to offer her a smile, because I am genuinely appreciative of her concern because I am pretty certain that without her, I would have forgotten that come June, what I do next is all on me, entirely. Suddenly, I was struck with an intense motivation to get a kick start on my future. It was a welcome relief to my usual attitude of being stuck inside of the past. "Okay, I'll do that. Thanks Ms. Pillsbury."

I shuttle out of her office. The hallways are empty, all of the students having long since made their way to their first classes of the day... Well, the hallways are _mostly_ empty. A couple of steps down from the office, I make out the figure of a tall boy leaning up against the wall, clearly skipping.

I recognize Noah almost immediately.

"Skipping class?" I ask, walking towards him and stopping in front of him where I cross my arms across my chest and cock my hip out in order to pretend like I am disappointed by his lack of responsibility when in reality, I am touched that he decided to wait up for me.

"Who, me?" He asks, pointing a finger into his chest, looking jokingly to his left and his right as if to see if there were any other possibile person that I am speaking to aside from him. "Nah, I have study hall this period."

"You have English." I call him out on this, because we have English together this period, and I know that he knows this much.

"Yeah, maybe I do. But I didn't want to go to class without my study partner." He gives me that look, that half-smile that has my knees quavering. "That would have been un-responsible of me."

"Irresponsible." I correct. Maybe him skipping out on English wasn't the best idea after all.

"See? You're teaching me already." He reasons. "So, what was all of that about?"

"Ms. Pillsbury wanted to talk to me about my plans after graduation." I shrug the entire thing off as irrelevant, but watch as Noah's smile fades beneath furrowed brows like this whole concept comes to him with a surprised concern.

"What _is_ your plan after graduation?"

"I'm not sure." I shrug, echoing the exact same sentiments that I had to Ms. Pillsbury only moments before. "Go to college, I guess... Ms. Pillsbury gave me a couple of brochures to choose from. I was thinking about going back east. What about you? What are your plans for college?"

"College?" He practically laughs in my face, but I can tell he is trying very hard to resist as to not come across as rude. "I'm not going to college."

"Why not?" I stand up a little bit straighter. This is news to me, and he says it with such a fierce determination that I would be lying if I said that I wasn't concerned. And I thought I was behind in my post-graduation plans.

"Look at me, San." He says, taking a step to the side so that I could literally get a good look at him, as though I was supposed to see something highlighted against his skin that was to tell me why it is he is choosing to graduate high school with no intentions of knowing what he is going to do after. "I'm the type of kid that peaks in high school, the type of kid that is going to spend his entire life in Lima, just like every other loser that ever graduated from William McKinley."

"You're not a loser..." My voice shrinks, because this conversation just took a serious left-hand turn, and I am disappointed with myself for never catching this side of Noah before. It was tough. Noah rarely displayed an attitude aside from that hot-headed bad boy that I thought I knew, but that was no excuse. He was my friend, no, he was my _boyfriend_ and I suddenly feel as though I had let him down in the most brutal way possible.

"Yeah, right." He scoffs, his voice teeming with sarcasm.

"You're not!" I raise my voice, persistent and duck my head so that he is forced to look me in the eye. "You're one of the smartest guys that I know, Noah; when you apply yourself, that is. I mean, think about it. Just last week when you rigged Jacob Ben-Israel's locker to open on its own and smack him in the face, that was genius, Noah. Cruel, yes, but genius, none-the-less... All you have to do is find out what you like and stick to it."

"Yeah?" He asks, straightening up a little bit, his confidence returning slightly in the acknowledgement that he at least has somebody cheering him on. "Do you really think so?"

"I know so." I nod. "Maybe you can even come with me. I can show you what Boston is all about, or even better, we'll take on New York together... That city won't know what hit it."

"I don't know..." His face shrinks uncertainly at the offer. "I hear that not very many people have pools for me to clean in New York or in Boston."

"You won't have to clean pools anymore." I promise him, reaching up so that I can hold gently onto his shoulders and look him straight in the eye. "The whole point of you going to school is that you'll never have to clean pools ever again, Noah."

"I just want to prove to everybody in this town that I can do it." He admits. "They think that I'm going nowhere. They look at me and they only see a Lima Loser who will graduate high school and only end up in jail, or worse - a loser that lives in his mother's basement for the rest of his life watching cartoons all day and getting fat."

"You won't have to worry about that." I assure him. "You're a really smart guy, Noah. You have a lot more potential than living in your mom's basement and getting fat. I know it."

"I will kind of miss all of the MILFs that come with my pool cleaning gig, though." He grins slyly, turning this conversation around on its head in an effort to let him know that I have managed to shoot down his spirits, and boost them up all over again in a manner of only a couple of minutes. His expression is enough to let me know that he _is_ joking - for the most part anyway - but either way, I slap him playfully against the arm and roll my eyes.

"Come on, you delinquent." I make the motion to walk down the length of the hallway, waving for him to follow. "Let's get to class."

* * *

"Hurry up, you two we're gonna be late!"

By lunch time, this has already been the strangest birthday that I have ever had, and now, I am running behind Quinn Fabray, who is rushing us, yelling as though it will make either Brittany, or me get to the gymnasium - where Sue Sylvester had just called an emergency Cheerios rehearsal - any faster.

This has been commonplace lately. With Nationals just around the corner, Coach Sylvester was constantly thinking of something new to add into our already ostentatious routine. These new moves were visions from God himself - she would tell us - that would pop into her head at random, prompting yet another emergency rehearsal that would threaten us at any time of day, no matter how ridiculous.

At least it wasn't four o'clock in the morning today, as it had been the last time.

Brittany, Quinn and I sprint through the halls, trying to make it from one end of the school to the other in a minute flat. I am only now considering the sheer size of my high school, and as I approach the locker room exhausted, sweating, and out of breath. I consider suddenly that making it to a Cheerios practice on time was not seeming quite like something that I wanted to wear myself thin over anymore.

With five minutes left to spare, the entrance to the locker room comes within sight. We rush inside, turn the corner and that is it. It's all over.

With a flash of red, I feel the thick, wetness against my face, I taste the distinctive, sweet tang of strawberries on my tongue, and I feel the chill of ice travel down my spine where it settles at the base of my feet and leaves me shivering almost immediately.

Quinn, Brittany and I stand in a straight line, Slushee dripping from all three of our faces, staining our Cheerios uniform, our white cheer leading shoes, and the floor with a gradual coagulation of strawberry slushee that pools like blood at all three of our feet.

When I am finally able to turn my brain back on following the attack, and blink rapidly to clear my eyes of the ice chips that sting at my vision and make it momentarily blurry, I see my fellow Cheerios, all standing in a threatening group in front o us. Lindsay Constigan takes charge, the apparent leader front and center, but one of at least five girls clutching at an empty cup, still dripping with the remnants of the Slushees, most of which was now on us.

"What the fuck!"

Quinn's immediate reaction is anger. She responds with a tone of violence so threatening that it is almost enough to leave even me afraid for poor old Lindsay, who apparently has no idea what kind of a war she just started. Clearly, she does not know what it is that Quinn Fabray is capable of.

Quinn lunges forward, her hands still sticky and red with Slushee and she pounces on top of Lindsay. She gives the older girl a firm shove, watching satisfied, as Lindsay stumbles backwards. When she does regain her bearing, I can see the distinct, red hand prints that Quinn has left against her Cheerios uniform...

But the girls standing behind Lindsay gang up threateningly around Quinn, and not even the vicious, young blonde is foolish enough to start something when she is clearly outnumbered, although silently I believe that Quinn could probably take every last one of these girls out singlehandedly.

"There is plenty more where that came from, just so long as you three losers are still a part of the glee club." Lindsay recovers quickly from the blow, brushing the stray remnants of ice chips off of her shoulders before fixing a strand of hair that had fallen lose from her tight ponytail, regaining her display of perfection just as quickly as it had fallen amiss.

I should have known. The tensions between the other Cheerios and the three of us has been growing increasingly ever since the word was spread that we were now apart of the glee club, however forced into joining that we had been. These days, the two groups were separated like the North and the South by the Mason-Dixon line during the Civil War. It should have been obvious that it was just a matter of time before these tensions escalated into something more physical.

The guys on the football team were feeling it too, this much I knew. In fact, just the other day while I was walking back to school after lunch, I had watched Mike Chang pull himself out of the dumpsters behind the cafeteria, after a bunch of his teammates had ganged up on him unsuspectingly and threw him in there... It had got me worrying that it would only be a matter of time before the rest of them got tired of all of this hazing and decided to quit glee just as we were getting ready for Regionals, but so far, none of them have budged.

"Come on girls. Let's get to practice." Lindsay flips her hair over her shoulders and - like a shepherd herding a bunch of cattle - guides the rest of the Cheerios from the locker room. They brush past us, a couple with more purpose than others, purposefully jutting their shoulders into our vulnerable bodies, jolting us into the lockers besides us.

Within a matter of a couple very tense moments, we are alone, just the three of us shrouded in silence save for the steady dripping of ice of it falls in clumps off of our bodies and against the linoleum floors below us.

"Happy birthday..."

I am the one to break the silence, muttering sarcastically to myself as I reach up in order to ring out my soaking wet hair, brushing my fingers through my ponytail in an effort to ride it of all of the ice caught inside of the tangled clumps.

"Here, Santana..." I open my eyes to find Quinn extending a small, white hand towel towards me. A peace offering to prove that we are now allies, caught in the same, miserable position. I accept it with a smile of gratitude.

"Thanks." I tell her before pressing my face deep inside of the clean linen. I release a loud, exaggerated groan, muffled by the fabric but not enough so. When I finally look back up from the towel, leaving an imprint of my own face in red against the white cloth, Brittany and Quinn are staring sympathetically towards me, although I can't help but think that they look pretty pathetic themselves, all doused in red.

"Will this ever stop?" I finally ask.

"No." They promptly say simultaneously.

"Not as long as we're in the glee club." Brittany adds. "I should know, I've Slushee the glee kids loads of times."

"Well what can we do about it?" I have to ask, because I had been anticipating Quinn and Brittany's response to my previous question to be exactly that. This torture enacted upon us by the people that had once claimed to be our friends, it was going to go on just so long as our allegiance with the New Directions did, and I wasn't entirely sure how much more of it I could handle.

"We can quit glee." I turn to Quinn, raising an eyebrow at her. Of course, she would make that suggestion. And here I was thinking that the two of us had actually made some progress. "Ugh, relax." She responds to my lack of amusement towards what she thought had been a clever joke with an exaggerated eye roll. "I was joking. I'm not ready to give up on glee just yet."

"You're not?" I ask, because out of all of the shock value that had struck me today, this actually surprises me the most. After all, we _are_ talking about the girl who, just last week, was looking for any and all opportunities to get herself out of the forced confines of the glee club and now here she was, facing her biggest hardships to date, and she was embracing it with open arms. "I thought you hated glee."

"Listen." Quinn huffs, turning towards me with a firm and determined set of hands pressed up tight against her hips. "Despite what you think you may know about me - and by the way, if you ever repeat this to anybody, I will promptly deny it and then murder you - I... I actually kind of like the glee club. It gives me something to look forward to in my days for the first time in a long time."

"So, you're not out to sabotage the glee club anymore, that's great but are you really trying to tell me that there is absolutely nothing that we can do about all of this?" I gesture towards the Slushee still dousing all three of our bodies. I don't mean to downplay Quinn's revelation regarding her true feelings for the glee club, but my brain is a bit preoccupied at the moment with the lingering effects of the brain freeze bought on by a group of girls that were supposed to be my teammates.

"We can fight back." Quinn suggests with a shrug of her shoulders.

"No more fighting." I shake my head against this suggestion, because there is no way in hell that I can get myself into yet another high-profile act of physical violence, especially not after everything that I had promised both Rachel, as well as my mother just a couple of days ago.

"So what; you want to just lay over and die?" She is taunting me, I can here it in her voice. She's trying to get a rise out of me, to motivate me to take charge and stand behind her as we marched through the trenches; three rogue cheerleaders against the entire student body of William McKinley High School.

"No." I snap back harshly, because I do not want to come across as weak, especially if it is a war that we are trying to wage here. "I want to stand up for myself and show them that whatever they do to me isn't going to have any influence at all in my life."

"That's cute." Quinn says in a way that tells me that she is clearly not amused. "You're going to stand up to them by not quitting glee and graciously accepting every last Slushee that they choose to throw in your face. How very Barney-esque of you. I remember when I was five."

"Do you have any better ideas?" I shoot back to the blonde who's only response is silence. I guess that if it does not come in the form of violence, it is not something on Quinn Fabray's repertoire at all. "I didn't think so."

Sinking back into the silence, I run the formerly white towel, now stained permanently red against my still-drenched skin, dabbing it carefully against my Cheerios uniform. At the rate I was going, I would consider myself lucky if this came out in the laundry, let alone with a soaking wet towel.

"How do we look?" I give up trying to clean myself off, tossing my towel too the side because it is getting me nowhere and we can't hide out inside of this locker room all day, or else they win.

I hold my arms out in a Jesus-esque pose and spin quickly so that they could get a good look at me for themselves. My hair is still soaking wet and I can feel a crude layer or sugar crusting against my hairline. I can see for myself, the big, red splotches against the white of my uniform, but it is the best that I can do under short notice and we are already late for practice as it is.

"As good as you're going to." Quinn sighs, her blonde hair reflecting under the fluorescent lighting so that it looks almost red with the Slushee still congealed inside of it. "Let's go before Coach Sylvester slays us worse than she is already going to."

The three of us file as a group into the gymnasium about fifteen minutes later than we were supposed to with our heads held up high as we can manage given the circumstances.

Our teammates are already lined up in their respective positions, long past the pre-practice warm ups, already prepared to run through their routine. I can't help but notice that Lindsay Constigan and her two closest friends have taken it upon themselves to fill in my, Quinn, and Brittany's spot in the front of the lineup.

The second that they see us filing into the gymnasium, they begin to snicker, trying to hide their faces so that Coach Sylvester - who's back is turned to us - doesn't see them... But tact has never been any one of their strong suites. Our coach immediately notices that something is going on behind her and turns to investigate. When she sees us trying to sneak in behind her, a dangerous smile forms at the corner of her lips and she places her hands against her hips, stiffening her spine so that she towers ominously over us.

"Funny, I don't remember authorizing a pre-practice trip to the local slushee machine." She sneers. "Especially not one that would warrant being fifteen minutes late for practice."

"Coach Sylvester, we-"

"Save it, Blondie." She puts up a firm, silencing hand that has Quinn swallowing the rest of her excuses down her throat before she has the opportunity to take the blame off of our shoulders and place it on the rest of our teammates'.

"You know that I do not tolerate tardiness on my Cheerios squad, ladies." Coach Sylvester takes a threatening step forward, circling around us like a shark in the water so that instinctively, the three of us huddle closer together for protection out of fear of being bit. "I don't care what your excuse is. Do you know what happens to my Cheerios squad if my three best cheerleaders are constantly being late for practice?"

"We... we lose Nationals." Brittany answers the question in a mousy voice, high-pitched and squeaky with fright although I have a feeling that it was meant to be rhetorical. Hearing the answer out loud seems to have only made our already grim situation even worse.

"Right you are, Brittany." Coach Sylvester chimes with a mock cheeriness and a smile, but it is the kind of smile that does not provide comfort, but only sends a distinct shiver down my spine. "We lose Nationals. And I. Will not. Lose. Nationals!" She articulates each and every syllable, her voice growing progressively louder with ever word that she speaks until finally, she is screaming in our faces so loud that I swear, the wind she produces out of her mouth nearly knocks me over backwards.

"You three can go right ahead and line up on the foul line. That one!" She juts her index finger towards the basketball court's foul line furthest from us. Quinn, Brittany and I all glance at each other uncertain, the fear of impending doom written across each one of our faces.

"You're going to run wind sprints until _I_ get tired."

* * *

By the time my mother has us shuttling off to dinner at Breadstix in order to celebrate my birthday, I am so exhausted from being forced into doing suicides for two straight hours at Cheerios practice today, that I can't even bring it inside of myself to argue the fact that she is bringing her boyfriend to what was supposed to be a _family_ outing.

I am so tired that I had almost asked her to reschedule dinner tonight altogether. Then again, the way that I am currently feeling, I probably wouldn't be well-rested enough until my _nineteenth_ birthday, so I suck it up and follow her, Andrew and Rachel into the restaurant, seeing as how they were all there for my sake anyway.

"So... Andrew..."

To my surprise, it is Rachel that addresses the man first, because we have been sitting in a practically complete silence ever since we had been seated almost ten minutes ago now, and I was starting to sense a desperation for small talk if nothing but for the sake of conversation. The man looks up from his drink, so shocked to hear his name coming from my sister's mouth that he practically chokes on his beer, which he had chosen that inopportune moment to take a large gulp from.

"What do you do exactly?" Rachel asks, and it seems like a lame go-to, but it is the fastest thing that she can come up with on the fly so we all go with it. "My mom never actually said..."

"Um... I'm a mechanic, actually." I pick up on Rachel's lame bid to inform Andrew that our mother never talks about him, but he apparently doesn't, still taken slightly off guard by the fact that she is actually talking to him. "I work at Burt Hummel's shop, down the street from you guys actually... It's a relatively new job, I used to work for somebody else but it didn't... it didn't work out."

The ending of his sentence is shrouds with mystery, and he fades out of it in an expression distinct for somebody who had just almost caught himself saying something that he didn't particularly want to admit to... Of course, this is not immediately picked up on by the rest of us, so distracted by this bit of news; a potential common trait, that it sails right over both mine, as well as Rachel's heads.

"You work for Burt Hummel?" I shoot my head up, suddenly interested, watching as he nods his head. "I'm pretty good friends with his step son, Finn Hudson."

"Hm, I didn't know that Burt had a step-son." He looks borderline interested, but not interested enough to spark anything jarring. I guess that I should have known that a grown man probably wouldn't have a lot to do with the seventeen year old step-son of his boss. Oh well, it was worth a shot.

"He's in glee with us." I explain, just to keep the conversation flowing. "So is his son, Kurt."

"Oh, I've met Kurt." He tells us. "He's that gay kid, right?"

There is an awkward pause that quickly ignites inside of the air lingering around our table, one that turns immediately into shifting eyes and a look of pure embarrassment filtering against Andrew's face for clearly having been caught saying something that the rest of us may or may not have taken offense to.

"Not that... not that I have a problem with that sort of thing or anything." He tries to laugh the whole thing off uncomfortably, trying to play it off as a joke in order to save his ass, but it has already come off as sort of crude. Now, he is left rambling for a change in the subject, in a manner that only makes the situation worse on him. "Actually, I've never, um... I've never been to a show choir competition before Saturday. I didn't even really know that that was a thing... I mean, I was surprised, I actually kind of enjoyed myself, especially after seeing how good the two of you did."

"You know what, I have to go to the bathroom real quick." With a groan of impending doom, our mother offers absolutely no help to correct this painfully tense situation. She pushes herself from the table. "I'll be right back."

I watch her go, my face desperate with longing for her not to leave us alone with this guy we barely knew, who is currently sitting in front of us ranting about gay people and show choirs... At least her exit had given him a reason to stop talking.

I turn to face him. He is so bright red, that I am having flashbacks to the Slushee that had hit me only a couple of hours ago. I watch as he takes an enormous gulp of his beer, trying to moisten his painfully parched throat. The sip is so large, that he practically drains the entire beverage into his throat with one, single shot.

"Listen girls..." He places the empty glass carefully down and clears his throat, pausing in order to think very carefully about what he is going to say next. I can tell in an instant that he is trying to utilize our mother's absence for an opportunity to talk to us one-on-one and I place my hands nervously inside of my lap, not entirely sure that I am ready for this. "I know that this whole thing is a little awkward..."

Awkward is putting it mildly. Oh well, at least he isn't trying to beat around the bush with us. I find myself willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, turning my body attentively towards him while meanwhile, Rachel - in the exact opposite fashion - sinks so far inside of her chair that she looks as though she is trying to disappear into it.

"I'm not your father, I know this and I promise you guys that I'm not trying to replace him or anything like that. I'm not trying to keep your mom away from you either, I just... I..." He pauses, considering his next words very carefully. "I just really care about her, is all. And I really care about you guys too. Maybe one day things can be a little bit more normal between the three of us if we tried?"

That last bit sounds more like a desperate plea for mercy than anything else; him begging us to give him at least a little bit of leeway despite all of the tension and I have to say, I must give him at least a modicum of credit for coming out forthright to us like that.

"I think it could be..." I reassure him and he nods his head appreciatively towards me before glancing towards Rachel in search for the same sense of approval, but my sister is determined to look anywhere but towards him. His eyes dart away from her before the situation can be made any worse. If there is something that he had to know about my sister, it was that Rachel had a tendency to be much less receptive towards strangers than me. I would explain this to him, but now just didn't seem like the time or the place. I just hoped that he didn't take offense. That is just how Rachel is, and this entire situation - uncharted territory for us all - was bound to only magnify this inherent distrust tenfold.

"Did I miss anything?"My mother comes rounding back to our table, smoothing out her pants before taking her seat. If only she knew.

"No." I open my mouth to respond, but Andrew beats me too it, immediately brushing off the conversation that the three of us just had before he flags down our waiter.

I guess he just thought that some things were better left between us.

"Sir?" He asks the man, pointing towards his empty glass that he had just drained in front of us.

"I'll have another."

* * *

It is late.

It's the kind of late that tells me that I should have been asleep hours ago, but for some reason, sleep is not something that seems to come easy for me tonight.

Instead, I lay wide awake inside of my head, propped up against the plethora of pillows that I have required to be comfortable ever since I was a child. The birthday card that Andrew had given me earlier that evening following our dinner that was just saved from being a total disaster is clutched firmly between my hands. I toy with the thick paper, flipping it open and shut, open and shut so quickly that it creates a small wind - like a fan - that keeps me cool on this astonishingly warm, fall evening.

Naturally, I had already removed the money that was inside.

When I had first opened the card, only to find a crisp, hundred dollar bill fall out of it and into my lap, I had tucked it immediately inside of my dresser drawer for safe keeping, not entirely sure what I was going to do with it. A part of me wanted to be stubborn and leave it there unspent in my refusal to be won over by him with cash. But the teenage-girl inside of me was giddy with the prospect of a shopping spree.

I read and re-read his message scrawled in sloppy hand-writing by the light of the moon teeming into my bedroom through the window. It was a quick and meaningless. _Happy Birthday_. It said, written beneath the pre-prescribed message that Hallmark had already gone through the trouble with for him. _From, Andrew._

With a groan, I slam the card shut and throw it back onto my night stand, before I roll over onto my side and squeeze my eyes shut, determined to fall asleep.

"Santana?"

I am surprised to hear a knocking at my door. It looks as though I am not the only person inside of this house that cannot fall asleep tonight. I open my eyes and glance towards the doorway where Rachel stands hesitantly, half inside of my room and half out, waiting for permission to enter.

"Are you awake?" She whispers towards me, despite the fact that I am looking straight at her.

"Obviously." I roll my eyes and push myself up onto my elbows so that I am in a seated position. I glance at the alarm clock on my dresser. Jesus, it was almost three o'clock in the morning already. What the hell was going on tonight? "Come on in, Rach."

Feeling a bit bad for getting snooty with her, I wave Rachel into my bedroom and she does not hesitate before taking me up on the offer, bounding inside of my room where she immediately crawls inside of my bed in a much more delicate manner than she had when she'd woken me up earlier this morning... or yesterday morning, I guess it would be now.

I shift in an effort to make room for her, but I sleep in a twin-sized bed and even though the both of us our relatively small, our bodies still press up tight against each other. She molds into my shoulder and I allow it to happen, lacing my arm around her shoulder and pulling her in closer.

I linger in the silence for a while, waiting for her to start explaining to me why it was that she'd come running to me so early in the morning, but she never says anything. Maybe she is waiting for _me_ to explain why _I_ was still awake myself, at this ungodly hour of the night.

"Do you miss Dad, San?"

When she finally does get to talking, it is enough to make my heart skip a beat. I almost wish that we were lost inside of the quiet all over again. Immediately I freeze. I can't believe that she is asking me this right now.

"Of course I do." I somehow manage to answer her, but my voice is barely above a whisper.

"So what do you think about all of this stuff, about this Andrew guy?"

Rachel was naturally a quiet girl, especially when it came to things like this; about her feelings, her emotions. It was just something that she had never been comfortable discussing out loud, not even with me. This is how I know that she must be taking this whole thing hard. For her to come to me in the middle of the night wanting to talk about it, it had to be serious. My heart skips a beat with worry, but I try to hold it in for fear that bombarding her with questions right now will only make things worse.

"It's a little bit... fast." I choose my words carefully because right now, Rachel is looking for backup, somebody to agree with her when she says that she doesn't like, nor trust Andrew Richardson one bit and I don't want to betray her trust by informing her that I did not have any particularly strong feelings - positive _or_ negative - about this guy at all. I agree with her for the sake of ease, but she only snorts in her response; a loud, disgruntled noise that indicates to me, that my interpretation of the entire situation was not enough to satisfy her need for assurance.

"She's happy, Rachel." I try to get Rachel to see reason because in the long run, that is really all that matters, the only thing that I truly care about. After all, _I_ was the one that had to deal with my mother after our father died. Rachel, I made sure stayed far away from that mess. I didn't want her to see it, but _I_ saw it. To see her happy about anything at all - even if it was a hasty boyfriend - I wasn't going to be one to complain about it. "She's happy, and Andrew is good to her. He's good to us... At least it's not like it was before."

For a long time, Rachel says nothing but I can feel her body stiffening against mine and for a second, I am actually afraid that she is going to stand up and march straight out of my room, angry at me for disagreeing with her. Eventually - much to my relief - however, her body relaxes with defeat.

"I hope you're right, Santana." She sighs. "I really hope that you're right."

"What's the matter, Rachel?" I do some digging, because this entire thing is very unlike my sister, who is usually the optomist between the two of us. I would be lying if I said that seeing her like this didn't worry me. "Is this whole thing really bothering you this much?"

Beside me, Rachel merely shrugs her shoulders before shrinking away from me, apparently embarrassed regarding her gut instinct telling her to be naturally unnerved by this entire situation.

"There's just something about all of this, about _him_..." She finally answers after a lengthy pause in which she thinks about her answer very, very carefully. "It just doesn't feel right, is all."

"You're over-thinking this whole thing, Rae." I try to reassure her. "You're just resistant to the whole idea because of dad, and I get it, really I do, but maybe it's time... This doesn't have to be such a bad thing, you know, having another person in our lives again."

"I guess."

She agrees with me but I can tell that it is purely for the sake of simplicity. She does not sound at all convinced.

"Come on, get some sleep, Rachel." I tell her because she has decided to end this conversation with that, and it was silly for us to stay up all night, when we still had at least four hours of blissful sleep to capitalize on before it would be time to get up and get ready for school all over again. Besides, I was eager to put this whole discussion behind us and settle it at that. "Tomorrow's a new day, okay?"

"Okay..." She verbally complies with me, but she doesn't move right away. Instead, she fidgets uncomfortably for a couple of brief seconds before she turns back over to face me. "Hey, San?"

"Yeah?"

"Can I... Can I stay in here with you tonight?" Her voice is meek and feeble, and I turn to face her. Her tiny body is framed in the moonlight, which somehow makes her look a lot smaller than what she already is.

I study her expression quickly, thinking about how much the relationship between the two of us has shifted back and forth in the last couple of months... When the two of us had been sharing a room, back in our tiny, cramped Boston apartment, it had not been all that uncommon for Rachel to climb into bed with me, or vice-versa and stay that way for the rest of the night... Now, I couldn't remember the last time that we had done this. Ever since we'd moved into this new house, so much has changed. I shrink into the semblance of normal, and give her my answer by wrapping an arm around her shoulder and pulling her close into me, running my fingers gently through her hair.

"Of course you can."

It is only after I have given her my approval that she shifts against me in an effort to make herself more comfortable. Burying her body into my side, I relax against the comfort of her wait and allow for her to close her eyes and drift steadily off to sleep.

Gradually, her breathing evens out into a rhythmic pattern, and suddenly, I am determined to remain wide awake besides her, stay up all night if that is what I had to do to watch over her, protect her, because I knew that this was nobody's job other than my own.

I am starting to get the strangest feeling that the only people still alive out there inside of this big, black world we call home are Rachel and I, and now that the thought is inside of my head, I am left wide awake and sleepless, unable to help but to wonder whether or not this planet truly is as big as everybody says it is.


End file.
